Thanks for the dox. Denae Louise Manchester (neé Phillips), born Nov. 11, 1984.
Account starts in November 2012. She’s a 28 year old woman living in Boston metro. This guy is her service human, Bradford Manchester. Her original handle was @dchickety.
First post about health issue: she’s gluten free.
“sensory christmas” ok, maybe she has an autistic nephew or teaches special ed or something.
She’s into yoga.
She gets normie colds and recovers quickly.
She has Irlen Syndrome. Oh gosh oh geez. Irlen is a made up illness also called “visual stress.” People claim they need colored overlays or glasses to help them read. There’s no real evidence it exists as a stand-alone condition (read: that the people displaying the actual symptoms don’t have mild dyslexia or some other unknown visual or processing disorder) or that tinted lenses help on anything more than a placebo level. And anyway Denae almost immediately stops using these glasses and we never see them again.
Mostly she’s just a woowoo wellness nut. Yoga, chiro, juicing for the many benefits, paleo…
We learn that she did some kind of study aboard in Cape Town, SA and a health program in North Florida. A bit of googlin’ says she was living in Jacksonville for a year with AmeriCorps. So fuck it, she’s a Florida Woman to me!
In Summer 2013 she started a
blog to talk about her recovery from a brain injury she sustained the year prior. A young girl that “could not control her emotions” kicked her in the head hard enough to fracture her skull. The blog goes on with bland “I am very brave despite my limitations” masturbatory crap and comparing herself to
a toddler who was nearly killed until October 2013 when she stops posting.
I’m guessing this was botox for migraines.
Cane appears out of nowhere in October 2013 while on a trip to Maine with her mother, then disappears again. We will later see that her mother actually uses a cane so it is possible she handed it off to Denae for a moment, who decided to pose as if it was hers.
#arttherapy. She will later get really into those adult coloring books and tag every post about them with this hashtag.
#paleo has gone out the window by this point in favor of ice cream. Most of her pics are just family, friends, her cat, and her boyfriend. Super normal.
Lupus awareness but to be fair, she’s not claiming to
have lupus.
We learn she has a masters in public health from the University of Massachusetts, not too shabby.
Occupational therapy for the head injury I suppose.
Turns 30.
We’re tyin’ the knot!
Her soon-to-be husband Brad is a carpenter and also a teacher.
And with that, she suddenly revives her blog to announce she has EDS, GP, and an unnamed autoimmune disease, all triggered by headaches from the TBI. Of course she does. And yes the cane she showed on that trip with her mom was in fact hers.
Out of nowhere: she’s on the way to the wedding and having major allergic reactions.
Literally days after it’s instagram official: #mastcelldisease. LMAO. RIP BRAD.
Tagging herself at an #alternativemedicine place called Wholebody Solutions. It’s (obviously) a woowoo clinic in Braintree, MA, that shills chiro, expensive useless supplements, “brain integration therapy,” cleanses and fasting. Hopes they can save her. Well this is escalating quickly.
Baby’s first ER post, just two weeks after the wedding.
This is the first of many pics she will post trying to prove she is having serious angioedema attacks. I swear these girls have never seen an actual allergic reaction before. What she's actually doing is slightly squinting her eyes and pushing her lower jaw out to distort her features combined with no makeup, hair a mess, and bad lighting and angles.
Three entire weeks after legally ensnaring a man, she’s sick of hospitals and doctors who can’t help! They’ve cancelled the honeymoon because she’s far too sick. It's been a month and she's already burning doctors out. Buckle the fuck up.
And we’re back in the hospital and now entirely unable to eat anything without “seizure-like tremors” and hives going down her throat. Beautiful. Face still not swollen, perhaps slightly around the eyes and cheeks but see also: steroids.
This hospital trip is now her honeymoon and the doctors are
not the best but it’s fine.
Scared for her endoscopy. Another puffy face “angioedema” selfie.
This is angioedema. Denae’s just got an unflattering angle and steroids.
#histamineintolerance #gerd
By July 1 she’s still in the hospital, still reacting to every food but now maybe also has an infection from steroids. Now she’s getting an NJ tube. Remember they have not even been married for an entire fucking month yet lmao.
Lol, why? You can walk just fine.
She gets her nose hose and..
Miracle! After getting her feeding tube she can suddenly eat grilled cheese sandwiches. But also hurray, she has name dropped a doctor for me! Dr. Mariana Castells at Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston is an allergy specialist and Harvard professor holding both an MD and a PhD. Her work focuses on reducing drug reactions especially to chemotherapy. She is considered one of the leading experts in mastocytosis and sits on the Mastocytosis Society’s medical review board.
After 12 days in the hospital she’s discharged.
Another doctor, James Kemp at Beth Israel Deaconess. He's just a regular gastro, not some super special GP specialist. Just whatever dude was available at the hospital to see her. Thanks for the tube, unwitting accomplice!
Within two weeks she’s already clogged her tube.
It's time to think about getting a GJ. Two weeks.
With a GJ on the table she has a ton of NJ complications. The GI doctor is totally on board with the GJ idea. Worried about her NJ being too visible but uses colorful bandaids under the tegaderm to draw attention to it.
Here we learn a little more about the brain injury. She was kicked in the head and fractured her skull. I had briefly entertained this was a recent injury and she was mistaking lingering TBI issues for new problems but it appears that was pure optimism on my part. When will I learn? She also mentions having learning disabilities that we will learn are unrelated to this injury.
She’s blowing off her IRL friends who have been with her for years in favor of making cards for spoonies she knows from the internet. At least some of these girls are actually sick but still, blowing off her real friends to court the chronically ill she wishes to be.
More tube problems. Her dumb doctors placed the dang tube in the wrong place! It was supposed to be an NJ but they gave her an NG! That’s why she’s having all these problems. Scheduled for a GJ next week.
Might have to go to the ER the night before her surgery because her darn NG tube. Also now claiming an unnamed swallowing disorder.
Two months after her wedding and one month after her NJ tube placement, she gets her GJ tube.
By the way, this one isn’t a disney world hopper but she does like the movies and also has an obsession with My Neighbor Totoro.
She
revives her blog now and we find that the reason for the sudden and dramatic crash in her health
before the wedding was she wanted to use a clunky off-the-rack wheelchair as the ultimate spoonie wedding photo prop. Also she’s now claiming she’s diagnosed with Mastocytosis which she is not.
And she’s also using the wheelchair to get attention at other people’s weddings now.
Pill porn! Looks like a bunch of supplements, advil, and maybe a stool softener. The only one I can ID for sure is the purple/white capsule is omeprazole, a PPI antacid. The other one with the imprint visible might be famotidine but don’t quote me. On her blog she says she’s on every antihistamine known to man but I see none here except the possible famotidine.
Liquid Hope is another formula like Kate Farms that bills itself as being organic, gluten free, made from whole foods, etc etc. but it’s marketed to crunchy moms with potato kids rather than social media spoonies.
Lots of ultra-dramatic posts and navel gazing about how brave she is while she recovers from this surgery literal babies go through every day.
A few weeks after her placement, she’s fucked it up. Losing weight, now on a hypoallergenic formula because she’s reacting to every formula. This sounds familiar somehow.
Allergic reaction to a fan and air con in her room.
Welp, that’s a new one for me.
Meanwhile, her cousin has a fucking brain tumor, but she has to remind everyone she’s the sick one.
Lol this reminds me of Mysteryelles’ pain hallucination land or whatever she called it. In this post she tells a concerned and confused childhood friend that all of these new diagnoses were triggered by the head injury she had. Just... nothing about this story makes sense. Okay, we know a few things from her blog posts and we will learn more details about this as we go along so just like, bear with me a second while I go on a schizo rant. Let's go with the premise that this actually happened. She claims an 8 year old girl with emotional regulation problems kicked her in the back of the head hard enough to fracture her temporal bones. When she first said the head injury was from being kicked, I assumed by a horse, not a child, and the googles seems to think this injury is from really significant things like ATV accidents, car accidents, and children falling from windows. But fine, the kid had retard strength, let's go with it. This happened in February 2012 and she claimed it caused significant impairment afterwards except she didn't really show anything on social media to suggest that. Some chiro, language worksheets, and the irlen glasses, which suggest she was not being taken seriously by actual doctors and could only get woowoos to listen to her. The one thing she seems to get legitimate treatment for is the botox for migraines, which no one can prove she's not having. They can rule out worse things that might cause migraine symptoms but they can't definitively say she is not experiencing migraines as long as she keeps up the act. She also will later claim she's had lifelong "learning challenges" that required her to be in special ed and have her parents fighting the school over accommodations for her. We will learn her vision has been abysmal from childhood and she couldn't coordinate riding a bicycle after months of trying, which would also explain why she needed the language worksheets and the irlen glasses better than a tbi. No, she will never tell us what her "learning challenges" were, just occasional mentions of how they affected her buried in posts about what a brave warrior she is to overcome these challenges. Which brings me to the next point of suspicion, the timing of this. She had based her whole identity on overcoming her learning disabilities and excelling in school, getting prestigious placements in internships and volunteering for a year on a public health campaign only to graduate with her masters and have to take a special ed teacher's aide position working for pennies. It's a position that only requires a 2-year degree. We will also learn the injury happened right after she met brad the service human. She claims her "vertebra flipped" from the impact of the kick which... I'm pretty sure would kill you? I sat here googling and overheating my noggin' trying to think of something that might conceivably be dumbed down to "flipped vertebra" and I got nothing. It's not whiplash because everyone would understand "I got whiplash from it." This sounds like she made up some spooky shit that sound super dangerous and potentially fatal, and it also neatly sets up for the big reveal that her EDS et al was dormant but triggered by this injury. Which, lol, not how genetic disease work? At all. So. There's my rant, she's full of shit, let's move on.
According to linkedin she was a special ed teacher's aide, so that at least tracks.
According to this dox site, she was working for boston public schools until 2013, a year after the head injury, and after that she was on workman’s comp until 2015 which is when she had the sudden escalation in symptoms and new diagnoses.
Anyway. Over on her blog she goes into what happened when she saw Dr. Castells: she “reacted” almost immediately and the doctor was very sweet and comforting to her, brought her blankets and let her rest in the exam room, and didn’t stare or tell her to stop being a dumbass like other doctors have. She’s officially diagnosed with chronic urticaria and angioedema and is now going to be getting home IV saline so she doesn’t have to keep wasting ER resources for it (SCORE!), Xolair, and more antihistamines. She gets an IOU for GERD surgery and more testing, with the goal of getting her off the tube and back to life ASAP. She has an EDS-related abnormality in her esophagus. She forgot to ask about continuous benadryl. Newbie mistakes! There's always next time!
We are back in the hospital and no longer have safe foods.
Another fun hospital vacation in the bag!
LOL LOL LOL “my doctors want to discharge me because I’m TOO COMPLEX!”
she didn’t react to special salmon! Score!
Gotta lovebomb the husband. She does this all the time, probably every two weeks there will be a post about her great and wonderful husband, almost always using the same pics from their wedding and their first date. As the account goes on, wedding and date pics are interspersed with pics of him caring for her during one of her many bouts of totally real anaphylaxis.
Another thing she posts all the time is old pics of her from college/grad school/the internships she took either as a 'look how brave I was to overcome my struggles' or to contrast with her current state. It's, again, often the same pics of her over and over and over time interspersed with new ones where she's pretending to be dying.
If I have to wear a mask..
yeah no, she's tensing one side of her cheek and mouth which is pulling over lower lip down and out and makng her face look disproportionately swollen on that side. Look at the side of her nose and her philtrum, they're stretched from the muscles pulling on them.
This is just a close up phone camera selfie with a
wonky focal length. She maybe did something to make her lips bigger, like the kiley jenner lip bullshit that was going around at the time, and she's slightly parting them and rolling them out a bit. But a bad selfie camera with a short focal length will make up-close selfies exaggerate features in the middle of your face which is why her nose looks disproportionately large (it is actually large, I know, but compare to pics someone else has taken like the ones of her and brad signing the marriage license where it looks proportionate to the rest of her face). It's also making her cheeks and jaw disappear into the ether which is giving the illusion that the features we are focused on, the nose and lips, are much larger.
This one's taken from a further distance a few days later. You can see how much less exaggerated her lips and nose are even though she's trying for the same effect.
She gets her nissen funduplication and…
Hello Cheyanne!
Having another specialist appointment with Dr. Castells, officially diagnosed (again?), getting Xolair
referred to the pain clinic. Her pain medications are no longer working. According to the hospital's website their program focuses on trying to get patients off of opioids and onto non-medication therapies for pain, but Denae seems to think it will be her ticket to all the oxycodone she can swallow.
and here we learn she did indeed have very lofty goals after her graduation and found herself in a low-paying job working in a public school. She also wanted to work in disability rights but instead decided to just larp disabled, so she utilized her graduate school research skills to research diseases to fake. I love it. This is some Rachel Dolezal shit.
PTSD from feeding tube, gib buttun now.
I love my feeding tube!
#sensoryplay Denae you’re a 30 year old with a masters degree, not an autistic child.
Before: rolling lips far inward to make them look smaller than they are naturally, smiling, eyes wide and bright; after: lips rolled outward to make them look bigger than they are naturally, pouting, eyes held nearly shut and slightly crossed. No anaphylaxis to be seen. Other doctors said she was too rare and complex!
Pain clinic appt rolls around and she goes in her best zebra gear
Here we get our first real crossover with Cheyanne, who at the time was hospitalized in Florida after she decided she didn’t want to go to college. This was the hospitalization that went on for like 8 months and had her go from healthy yoga freak to TPN-fed forever bbygirl. And they’re collecting donations for Dr. Afrin. Lol what?
What’s a birthday if you can’t take a hospital selfie? How did we end up here? Because two bites of cake made her go into that super real anaphylaxis they all have and she blacked out from pain. Muh swelling. Yeah welcome to steroids, enjoy your stay. Looking forward to starting ketamine soon.
#prayforparis but also this is about meeeee!
Back story: Denae’s mother is chronically ill and Denae wanted to follow in her footsteps. She never specifies what mom has but it appears to be something autoimmune.
Oh my god I never get tired of her fake “angioedema” faces. Basic bitch eczema makes your eyelids swell more than this. All you're doing is relaxing the muscles in your face lmao.
You can still get out Brad! There’s no shame in divorcing a crazy bitch! Wheelchair is back.
All of this swelling and bad angle selfies is her trying to fast track at-home IV benadryl. Also maybe you have tachycardia because you’re constantly pumping your body full of epinephrine and prednisone. Just a thought.
We have a walker.
Gettin’ that dilaudid, hellll yeahhhh.
Again. Bad angles, steroids.
10/10 pain but smiling with good camera angle and updating to say she’s getting Xolair!!!
lol suddenly sadface because… the allergist at the hospital told her it wasn’t mast cell, her bloodwork was fine, and she was discharged. She is getting a port but they only approved IM, not IV benadryl. Lol.
5 epis in less than 2 weeks? Rookie numbers.
Two days after Brigham and Women’s told her to take a hike, she’s at a different hospital, South Shore. No update.
Getting a home help aid, also her heart is suffering because she keeps pumping epinephrine into her body for attention.
Imagine you were a diabetic and documented every time you had to give yourself insulin and decorated the vials for holidays lol
GIVE PORT. WANT PORT NOW.
Needs a wheelchair for… ouchy legs from injections. Still not getting a port. Getting a repeat tilt table because her tachycardia has gotten worse now that she’s on a hell combo of medications.
Gee i wonder what's causing that.
Now that she’s friends with Cheyanne she’s reacting to everything including water.
Getting Xolair finally and…
ANAPHYLACTIC SHOCK! Her husband must do everything for her because she can’t walk now.
Obligatory “thank you for not calling me on my bullshit” after staging another emergency. Seriously she does this every single time she pulls some shit with almost no variation.
Hi Red! Good to see you here too. and you, too, are someone who uses epi pens for anxiety!
She needs to have a psych eval for her pain clinic. Also she name drops another doctor, this one a holistic health weirdo who runs a woowoo clinic, Dr. Mark Mincolla. He is not an MD. He’s a PhD “Nutrition Therapist and quantum energy healer.” Bless. Denae is allergic to water but going to try a bunch of dodgy supplements from a quack. Hypoallergenic tube feds are a no, water is a no, but she can still eat some things!
Over in the comments she’s whining that she can’t get a port because her neurologist is uncomfortable with it and Dr. Castells says that isn’t her job. She needs to see a new GI who she hopes will be more compliant. Oh hey remember that lupus awareness post a long time ago? She WAS claiming lupus! That was back in 2014 during her paleo yoga health nut phase, in the months leading up to the wedding, after the alleged head fracture but before the EDS claim started. Sulfasalazine is used in rheumatoid arthritis and ulcerative colitis according to the googles.
Allergic to acupuncture.
PORT NOW NOW NOW!!
Oh hello, this girl she's talking to is MC. We will talk about MC.
Reflecting on how this all started literally the day after her wedding. Wow Denae what amazingly bad luck you (and brad) have!
She gets a repeat TTT and it shows she
might have borderline POTS (lol) but that she does have sinus tachycardia. We know she takes an asston of epinephrine and antihistamines, also presumably albuterol in her nebs, all of which cause sinus tach. So does anxiety for that matter. And deconditioning.
She asks Castells for the continuous benadryl pump and is told no, only Dr. Afrin does that and she doesn’t see enough evidence that it works. She gets ciclosporine, an immune suppressant. Dr. Castells tells her to stop using epi so often before she kills her heart and as a result Denae almost dies!!!!!!! And she still is praying the GI doc will sign off on a port since the neurologist’s answer went from ‘no” to “absolutely not” now that it’s determined she probably doesn’t even have POTS.
