HP and the Extensive Hospital Stay

Here we have patient Harold Dursley, age 28, who’s been at the tender mercies of an NHS Insane Asylum in the country for 9 years before being transferred here in an attempt to arrest some of the massive infections from these untreated bedsores.

Apparently Mr. Dursley was severely abused by his birth parents, last name Potter, until Child Services removed him from that environment and placed him in foster care. You can see some evidence of scars from this period. Most notable is the jagged one on his forehead, reportedly caused by his father with a broken beer bottle.

His foster parents were not much better, but at least were not physically abusive. They even forced him to sleep in a locked cupboard until he just outgrew it. They pocketed all the dole payments, which increased when they formally adopted Harold. A very few photographs from this era show a quite corpulent family with an emaciated young foster child shunted to background as a telling testimony on continued, if lesser, abuse. Harold didn’t complain about this treatment because it was an order of magnitude better that his parent’s home. He did retreat into a quite elaborate fantasy world, progressively withdrawing from reality. Not long after puberty this fantasy manifested in a violent lashing out that got worse over time until the Dursley’s could no longer control him and reluctantly (they’d lose their social support payments from Westminster) abandoned him at a Hospital for the Incurably Insane. There he often attacked inmates and staff with a stolen pencil he’d wave like a magic wand when he wasn’t trying to stab people. He called the people around him invented names like Draco, Snape, Death-Eater, and the Administrator was referred to as Voldemort. He talked of invisible trains and hippogriffs in his more calm moments, but after age 18 he never really ‘saw’ the actual world, and over time these quieter episodes became less frequent until sedation and 24 hour restraints got the troublesome Harold Dursley shunted aside and forgotten, leading to the bedsores and subsequent infection. Oh, and apparently he prefers the nickname Harry.