The way Mary Steward saw it she had three options.

She could find a better way of killing herself and succeed this time, she could return to a psychiatric hospital and remain there until she died, or she could find some way of living her life with her phobia of vomiting.

Mary, in her twenties at the time, chose option three.

“For 75 years I thought I was the only person with emetophobia – the fear of sick and being sick,” says Mary, now 81.

“I know most people don’t like being sick, but my fear was something else. I had to give up being a primary school teacher, which I absolutely loved, for fear of children being sick.

“I didn’t have any children myself because I couldn’t bear the thought of having morning sickness. Now when my friends all go to spend Christmas with their children, or go on holiday with them, I don’t have that.”

Mary spent months at a time in psychiatric hospitals.

She endured treatments while in hospital, including abreaction, a psychoanalytical therapy introduced by Sigmund Freud where patients are encouraged to sniff ether until they are semiconscious, after which doctors fire questions at them to try and draw out deep held anxieties or trauma.

When that didn’t work Mary was subjected to Freudian dream analysis treatment, where she had to tell a psychiatrist all about her dreams.

“But I couldn’t understand how any of this would stop my phobia,” she says.

That is when Mary decided to try and live with her fear.

“I told my husband, Edgar, about my phobia and he was very understanding about it all, even the fact I didn’t want any children,” says Mary.

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Although she hasn’t been physically sick since she was 11 years old, Mary remembers first being frightened of being sick.

She recalls: “I was six years old and my mother said to me one day, ‘come and get your teddy bear, we are going out.’

So I did. We got on the train and off again a few stops later. She took me to this big house and then she was gone. She’d left me at Blakely House boarding school in Worcester Park.

“I can’t even remember the first two days there. My first memory was laying in bed and feeling incredibly sick.

Then, out of the blue, I was absolutely terrified I would be sick. I had never been so scared of being sick before.”

What made it worse was Mary admits she was a fussy eater and combined with the fear of being sick, she thought it best if she ate little or nothing at all.

“The problem was that at my school, if you didn’t eat your lunch, it would come out again, cold and congealed, for your dinner. If you didn’t eat it at dinner, it would come out again at breakfast the next day,” she says.

Mary was never told why she was sent to boarding school and she was left feeling as though her parents just didn’t want her.

It was just as the Second World War had started and her eldest brother who was ten years older than her, was considered a man.

Her other brother was evacuated to Cornwall, where Mary’s mother spent two months to help him settle in.

But Mary remained at boarding school.

When it came time to make the transition to secondary school Mary tried every trick in the book to ensure she was not sent to another boarding school.

“My mother took me to an interview for one and I purposely cried through the whole thing, until the headmistress said I wasn’t the right type of girl to attend, so I had to go home.”

When she was old enough Mary completed her teacher training but after 12 months on the job Mary had to leave.

“I was a nervous wreck all the time because I was scared of children being sick in front of me. I loved kids and it was awful having to give up the job.

“Most people think people with phobias like mine are exaggerating, but it would be the first thing I thought about every morning, wonder if I could make it through the day. It’s not like people who have a fear of flying. They don’t have to fly. A fear of sick and being sick is with you all the time.”

Mary retrained as a shorthand typist and book keeper. Shortly after this she moved to Essex and met Edgar.

She didn’t stop trying to find a solution or a cure, and read as many self-help books as she could find. Doctors didn’t seem to understand Mary had a real phobia and other treatments, including neuro linguistic programming, didn’t work for her.

Mary, from Braintree, even endured and overcame ovarian cancer in 1981, refusing chemotherapy for fear of sickness, and breast cancer years later, all the while fearing her illness would bring on sickness.

It wasn’t until Mary stumbled across a relatively new programme called Thrive that she found her way out.

She says: “It was positive from the outset because they have a book dedicated to helping yourself overcome emetophobia.

I thought, if there is a whole book on it then there must be others who have the same phobia as me.

“Since doing the programme I have met so many other people with emetophobia, but like me, didn’t tell anyone for years out of shame and fear they would be ridiculed.”

The programme, says Mary, helps you take responsibility for your fears, by explaining your fears come from yourself, and only you can overcome them. It does not attribute trigger points or events from the past as kick starting a phobia.

It outlines tasks to complete, encouraging readers to change the way they think, says Mary.

Mary explains: “I came across it after Edgar died three years ago from pancreatic cancer.

He’d been at Farleigh Hospice, Chelmsford, for two weeks, where I stayed with him, and when he died I came home and thought, I am too old to work, I have no husband to care for, no children, I still have my phobia. I thought I am really useless. What do I do?

“I could have another ten or more good years of life left, so if I could get rid of my phobia, wouldn’t it be fantastic?

“So I went online and found the Thrive book and realised I couldn’t be the only person with this phobia.”

Mary has been cured of emetophobia since Christmas last year and has since given speeches at conferences about her journey. She is also training to be a Thrive consultant, hoping she can help others like her and people with other phobias, anxiety and depression.

She feels that as well as helping her with her fear of sick and being sick, the Thrive programme has also helped develop her self esteem and confidence in otherways too, including driving to and from conferences across the region on her own.

“I hadn’t driven in 20 years but I woke up one night before a conference and thought, of course I can do this.

“There was also a moment when I was going through the programme and I felt a bit sick and thought, I really don’t want to be sick.

“I thought, I’m not going to get through this, but after talking to Rob Kelly, who put this programme together, I realised that not wanting to be sick is just normal. It wasn’t a fear like I used to have, I was getting through it. After all, no one wants to be sick, do they? It’s all about changing your mindset.”

Mary adds: “In many ways it feels like I have started my life again.”