Community Munchausen's by Internet (Malingerers, Munchies, Spoonies, etc) - Feigning Illnesses for Attention

[Kate Farms Shill]

I wonder if Amanda was ever truly in the grips of an ED or if purging/starving became just another aspect of the munch?
Regardless, at a certain weight there is a line at which the boundaries between "actual disorder of the mental type" and "forcing it so hard you give yourself a heart attack" overlap and I'm not denying that she clearly went full deadly-skelly in the way that even those with actual disorders might fail to reach, but I am simply questioning the validity of the ED as a primary motivator or even a disorder at all.

Yeah I get the strong impression it was a means to an end rather than an "organic" ED that just sprung from the depths of her brain. Pro-ana tactics with a personality disorder strong enough to follow through. She wanted attention and "toys" from being sick, she wanted to lose weight, and purging was an easy enough way to accomplish both of these things. There's a lot of reasons I think this but one is that she constantly exaggerated how much weight she actually lost and how thin she was.

Makes you wonder if she was repressing being gay and kind of punishing herself

I don't know if I'd go with punishing. Sublimating? Is that the term I'm looking for? Instead of dealing with the actual issue she created a new one to distract herself and everyone else.

if I can tinfoil a bit, she "got sick" right when her family moved to Florida, which happened after two years of minimal social media updates except "i love my job." I've just kinda been wondering, maybe she was actually out to her friends or even dating someone in secret until her family moved down there and she had to slam that closet door shut real fast. Faking sick might have started as a distraction and turned into an addiction/personality because it was easier than dealing with what was actually bothering her and reassured her that her parents still loved her.

 

[often puzzled]

A caveat that eating disorder research is confusing, and no one really understands eating disorders in general. There's a lot of "evidence suggests"-- a whole lot more is "suggested" than is known for certain.

That said, there appears to be a statistically significant correlation between BPD and bulimia nervosa. Anorexia nervosa shows up more with the cluster C types; with bulimia, it's cluster B. There are plenty of people who have an eating disorder and no personality disorder (and vice versa). From tonight's quick google, here's an article abstract (I did not bookmark anything I've previously read about it, because that would be too easy, apparently). This ends up tying in with DBT being useful for BPD and bulimia but less useful for anorexia (there's some move to try RO-DBT for anorexia and overcontrolled personalities).

(sorry for all the quick and dirty links to information, but hopefully they give a very general idea)

I'm not ever surprised to see the ED-munchie correlation. People with eating disorders often want to protect the disorder so that they continue the behaviors. Both could be a way to relieve stress, find your identity, exert some control in your life, and on and on and on. We actually get to see her using the "illness" to distract from the ED when she gets caught siphoning the contents of her stomach.

KFS theorized this in the post above mine, but I do wonder if she was dealing with some things w/r/t coming out and hiding it from her family. None of this is a good way of dealing with your emotions, but it's all a way to deal with them.

 

[Kate Farms Shill]

KFS theorized this in the post above mine, but I do wonder if she was dealing with some things w/r/t coming out and hiding it from her family. None of this is a good way of dealing with your emotions, but it's all a way to deal with them.

I mean, at its core it's not that different from my generation ending up with public trainwreck drinking problems. Substance abuse to avoid having to think about it and a big loud distraction so no one else will, either. The olds just didn't have to worry about social media so there was no need to hide the bourbon and bar fights behind an insta-friendly facade.

 

[glioblastoma multiforme]

There's a lot of reasons I think this but one is that she constantly exaggerated how much weight she actually lost and how thin she was.

i felt like she was exaggerating too. she did get very thin but a drop from 90 to 75 would be extremely noticeable.

A caveat that eating disorder research is confusing, and no one really understands eating disorders in general. There's a lot of "evidence suggests"-- a whole lot more is "suggested" than is known for certain.

i think a lot of the problem is that people with EDs are extremely unreliable narrators. even if they are trying to be truthful rather than protect their illness, malnutrition mangles the brain, including things like short term memory to the extent that sufferers will forget the end of a sentence by the time they are half way through. i'm not sure how much insight they have into why they started disordered behaviours, and what made them spiral out of control, even if they recover.

i suspect there is also a huge amount of variation even in sufferers presenting very similarly and engaging in the same behaviours so what would be useful in treating one might not help another. the correlation with certain types of personality disorders mentioned above is interesting and it makes sense given that most of our ED munchies seem like raging cluster bs.

 

[Kate Farms Shill]

i felt like she was exaggerating too. she did get very thin but a drop from 90 to 75 would be extremely noticeable.

TBF the lower numbers were from people who were calling her out for purging. She was more prone to raising her high weight to make the loss more extreme.

 

[Otterly]

i suspect there is also a huge amount of variation even in sufferers presenting very similarly and engaging in the same behaviours so what would be useful in treating one might not help another.

EDs are symptoms more than diseases. I think a lot of mental Illness is the same - it’s like a manifestation of an underlying issue or issues rather than a definite pathology.
We tend to want to think of mental illness like a disease. Something like measles - a single cause, a more or less consistent disease course and a set treatment. But even diseases like cancer are more like ‘an end process or outcome of multiple underlying things.’ Glioblastoma for example - multiple ways to get to the same point, but it’s still a defined, testable for thing.
When you get to mental illnesses, you’re at the other end of that scale. We have no biomarker tests for depression. Everything is diagnosed on symptoms or signs. An eating disorder is an end process of goodness knows how many underlying issues. So is depression, anxiety, probably things like bipolar and schizophrenia too.
I think about this stuff a lot and I wonder how we will see such illnesses in a hundred years time. I suspect we will be horrified at our lack of knowledge

 

[Kate Farms Shill]

Dani Marina has had an interesting year. I know we don't generally discuss her here because she's more Reddit's domain but she is rapidly approaching 'find out' after years of fucking around.

Just FYI some people brought to my attention that the long posts with a single spoiler are kind of a nightmare on Tor because they don’t wanna load and on mobile when you enlarge an image sometimes it brings you to the bottom of the post and you have to scroll back up to the top. I’m gonna try breaking them into several spoilers to make it a little easier. Lemme know if this is better or if anyone has another suggestion, and sorry it took so long to realize.

Spoiler: back story

Dani was a micropreemie and is kind of retarded because of it in addition to being extremely stunted. She peaked in high school when she was a varsity cheerleader and severely anorexic (purging type, but don’t call her bulimic because she’ll chimp). She has never moved on from this point or developed an identity outside of sick and anorexic, to the point where she still dresses like it’s 2003. She claims she has a boyfriend. The guy exists but hasn't been seen with her since 2013 and seems to have had no contact while she just insists he’s very private and works all the time. She shows the same 10+ year old photo of them together every time she wants to prove they’re still in a relationship. For most of the last decade she’s been on disability and living in subsidized housing, completely stagnant and surrounded by filth, buying Hello Kitty tat and reading books meant for teenagers. Her hygiene is abysmal and she goes days on end without showering or changing her clothes. Her poor hygiene is often implicated in her frequent infections.

After ED treatment in 2014 she started sliding into physical illness faking which started with fibro drug seeking and trying to find a reason she should have a feeding tube and accelerated when she discovered Jaquie, whom she became intensely jealous of. She started trying to get the Jaquie Treatment and eventually got a place at Temple U's motility clinic where she was fitted with a gastric pacemaker after starving and drugging herself to a gastroparesis diagnosis. Over time she got a G tube, then a g-j tube, then TPN and separate g and j tubes after switching to Upenn. The whole time she was continuing to eat and over time she got quite fat from running TPN on top. After a bout of poopy-bacteria sepsis her TPN was stopped.

Dani’s best friend Kelly, herself a recovered anorexic sliding into munchie territory, died unexpectedly in February 2021. Cause of death unknown but one of Dani’s white knights accidentally revealed that Oxycontin was found on a toxscreen after death while trying to defend Dani against addiction claims. Dani was the one that found Kelly. Since Kelly died, Dani has gotten off disability, gotten a retail job where she works 50+ hours a week, and started and quit many attempts to be a nurse. She lost the TPN weight/bloat but in her typical style, she complained that this was terrible for her as an anorexic who had to fight her ED every day, wore clothing that is visibly several sizes too small so she could claim she was down to a size whatever, and tried to talk doctors into putting her back on TPN because she claims running feeds through her J-tube, even at an agonizingly slow rate, is so painful she ends up incapacitated by it.

Spoiler: the central line saga

By August of last year she was back down to a healthy weight but saying she was way too skinny. Meanwhile she gives away that she runs her feeds as low as possible, barely eats, and tube purges when she does. She actually was requesting her doctor switch her to a larger g-tube to make "draining" after she eats easier. No shit, this woman has no idea how transparent she sounds and since 2017 half the discussion surrounding her is "how does she manage to get any doctor to take her seriously?"


at the end of the month she went to Cleveland Clinic to see Dr. Michael Cline, a gastro, and Dr. Matthew Allemang, a surgeon. While there she finally got the hEDS diagnosis she'd been chasing for a decade (but not really because later she'll say it's just suspected and not diagnosed).


A month later she purged herself into an admit at UPenn in Philly. There they try to get her to take her feeds and wean her off some of the insane amounts of medication she was taking while she, of course, was gunning for a central line and TPN again.


Here's the medications she was taking. She also tells us she was only running her feeds at 5mL / hr which is a teaspoon.


Someone calls Penn to warn them about Dani and she's in a panic thinking they might discharge her before she gets her line.


She has both tachycardia and bradycardia episodes.


She might have a tortuous intestine which is when your intestine is longer than usual and develops sharper than normal bends and turns to fit, which makes it harder for things to move through it. On 27 September 2022, she was given a new hickman line and put back on TPN after wailing that anything more than 8mL of formula per hour was agonizing.


And she immediately started fucking with the new line.


By Halloween she was posting about feeling really sick and in early November she was admitted for covid and a clogged line with possible infection.


It turns out the line is in a weird position. She has total occlusion of the SVC. I'm gonna be honest, I am nowhere near smart enough to understand what most of this means. I think they're saying her SVC is very narrow and when there's a hickman threaded through it, it completely blocks the vessel and renders the line unusable. They place a new hickman in it anyway.


And she's right back to fucking with it.


She's already not getting blood return, just like last time, and on 13 November (two days after it was placed) she's already admitted back at Penn.


It needs to be replaced two days later. She gets a new pediatric line and proceeds to post more gross, bloody pics of it.


And she's fucking with it. People call her out for soaking in a bathtub full of scented bath products with a catheter that goes directly to her heart.


Lookin good!

Spoiler: the liver saga

With that settled she starts looking for her next big adventure. While starving and purging she had episodes of hypoglycemia. Now that she's back on TPN she contnues to complain of periodic dizziness and weakness and her PCP suggests she see an endocrinologist. He mentions insulinomas, a usually benign neurendocrine tumor that causes overproduction of insulin and therefore hypoglycemic episodes.


She uses this to start running TPN for 24 hours instead of the 12 they prescribed and trying to get an endocrinology appt.


Doctors say no, 12 hours. Run feeds if you have to but she literally can't????


So she starts complaining of intense pain around her j-tube that prevents her from running feeds and goes to the ER for some sweet, sweet IV fent.


She never updated about the endocrinology appointment and by march she was complaining of an infected J-tube and inflammation in her stomach.


after 10 days of antibiotics she's still not doing better so she goes to the ER and is admitted.


At her local hospital, her liver has something called phlegmon, which sounds like it's a crust that grows somewhere unmentionable. I appreciate that she posts these but again, couldn't tell you what most of it means other than "liver bad, probably infected"


It is infected. It gets worse so she's taken by ambu to UPenn. There they tell her the infection might have translocated to her line which might need to be pulled again.


She goes on tiktok and tells us her gallbladder is also infected now. It's spreading. She also has a hole between the ventricles in her heart which is common but has never been mentioned on any of her many EKGs.

Her line is fine but now her bootyhole is bleeding uncontrollably.


They discharge her anyway on 4 April.


Away from the watchful eye of her doctors and nurses, she mysteriously starts having line issues again.


And we're back to being hospitalized for hypoglycemia and a possible insulinoma by April 18.

People would like to know how all the other doctors she's seen have missed this wildly fluctuating blood sugar issue. She has no idea, honest injun.


and still claiming her boyfriend is just super private and that's why they're never together.


In May, after another line changed, she was admitted with a strugglin' liver. They took her off most of her medications to give it a rest.


Pulled off her psych meds to give her liver a break, Dani immediately starts posting about depression and anxiety for attention. Most of these are just her staring at the camera while an audio loop plays.

And sabotaging her feeding tubes after making dramatic videos about self-sabotage lmao


She looks back on the only time of her life she was actually doing something that can be considered an accomplishment.


And announces she wants to be a psych nurse. Don't worry, she has started and quit online "pre nursing" schools like 15 times in the last calendar year. She will never make it past asswiper, if even that.


For weeks everything is about her mental health.


June she gets her gallbladder removed and goes on an asston of pain meds.

Her usual bait about how she's totally fighting her anorexia and if you're mean to her she'll relapse.


They're testing for insulinoma again. The first test came back negative so it was done incorrectly, obviously.


Admitted because drugs are fun, lmao fuck my liver y'all.


And now after months of antibiotics, she's all yeasty inside like a crusty, filthy bread roll.

Spoiler: the stomach saga

Dani got a gastric stimulator in like 2017 at Temple University. For whatever reason, it was still being used even though she claimed it never gave her symptom control. In June she went back to Cleveland Clinic where her surgeon decides to switch it off. Surprise, she feels better without it. They decide it's time to remove it.


Cleveland also tells her that Penn is totally wrong about not having at home IV meds even though she's an insane munchie with bad hygiene who keeps getting dooky bacteria in her lines.


Back home she breaks her hickman almost immediately.


She didn't do it on purpose, of course. But since she's admitted, why not give her more pain meds? The line was repaired after a few days but she had to be off TPN and complained the whole time.

Around this time she announced the stim was coming out but she did so in a series of rambling nonsensical videos where she just talks about how these doctors make her feel validated. Reddit apparently had some shit to say so Dani posted a rant. She's getting the stimulator out and part of her stomach removed at the same time.


Cheyanne dies and people warn Dani she's gonna end up that way if she doesn't chill the fuck out.


So she goes to the ER with anemia to prove she's really sick. She's on blood thinners because she had pulmonary emboli in the past, by the way.


On the 27th of August she's checked into Cleveland for the stim removal.


She has the surgery and is in a shitload of pain again. They won't give her megadoses of opiates this time.

They also took her G-tube away and Dr. Cline "doesn't believe" in them. She needs that to purge, gosh! These doctors tell her to try eating now that she has the problematic stim out which is bullshit. So of course takes to social media to ask if anyone has spare NG tubes so she can tube herself against her doctor's wishes.


This is unacceptable so she's back to begging Penn for a new tube.

On the 31st she's still at Cleveland but they give in to her incessant whining and give her what she wants.

She spent another five days in Cleveland Clinic before she was discharged on the 5th of September. By the 6th she started showing off her surgical wounds separating.


shortly thereafter, complaining she's out of pain meds.


She’s violently vomiting and there’s fluid building up where her stimulator was.


And she’s admitted again, this time with a colon infection.


She posts a video where she’s high as hell.

Someone calls her out for having a pain medication addiction. Dani says that can’t be so because she only gets them when she’s post-surgery or is in the hospital. Which is exactly what just happened. She had surgery, blew through the pain pills they sent her home with, then rocketed back to the hospital for more dilaudid.

Home from the hospital three days later after they “got sick of her” and wouldn’t give her opiates because they’ll slow down her gut motility. She complains that they should have given her the opiates anyway because she’s already on TPN so who needs gut motility?

On the 19th she was back at ER with a fever.


Her line is infected.


Dani doesn’t want the line removed but it’s colonized with fecal bacteria again. She wants some option where they send her home with the line but she won’t get sepsis from running TPN through it.


No one is flushing her line because of the poopy bacteria in it and she’s worried it’ll be occluded when she gets home and she won’t be able to use it anymore.

Her liver and spleen are enlarged and she is in the early stages of cirrhosis from TPN.

Again, she really has no idea what she wants. She doesn’t want her line pulled because she claims this hospital is unqualified to deal with her SVC issue, she doesn’t want to use it because it’s infected, but she wants at home IV antibiotics and to use her line for TPN when she does get home. Doctors won’t listen to her!!

Spoiler: the lung saga

On 22 September she posted a screenshot showing she has possible sepsis and a lower respiratory infection.


Her next videos she's on oxygen and saying every time she goes off it she desaturates down to the 80s. They might draw fluid out of her lungs to see what’s going on exactly.

She announces its two different pathogens and one is bad news. Stenotrophomonas maltophilia is one of those hard-to-treat bacteria that spreads in hospitals and is naturally resistant to a ton of antibiotics. The other is our old friend Enterobacter cloacae, the same bacteria that had caused a colon infection the week prior. But at least it's not sepsis this time.


Up to 4L oxygen and still feels like she can’t breathe.


6L, still can’t breathe.


Changing her antibiotic to try to treat the new beastie growing in her lungs.


She crashes and is moved to ICU.


On the 25th she’s on a bipap and her infected line is removed finally.


Every time they try to transition her from bipap to regular oxygen she desaturates.


On the 28th they move her to high flow oxygen.


On the 30th she’s finally back on regular oxygen and moved back to the regular floor from ICU.



And as of today, she’s just worried about getting a new line and trying to get transferred to Penn so she can get her TPN back. Right back where we started, no lessons learned, and ready to do it all again.


And chimping when people question if she really needs TPN given that she's gaining weight rapidly and the central line keeps almost killing her

 

[Aunt Carol]

Her central line was "just placed yesterday" and now there's some visible blood at the insertion site?
I hope that one day there will be an answer to medical mysteries like this.

It turns out the line is in a weird position. She has total occlusion of the SVC. I'm gonna be honest, I am nowhere near smart enough to understand what most of this means. I think they're saying her SVC is very narrow and when there's a hickman threaded through it, it completely blocks the vessel and renders the line unusable. They place a new hickman in it anyway.

From the text on dictation in the first set of line images, the tip of the first CVC was just a little too far out and needs to be re-advanced, further into the SVC, if they were going to use it as a central line. It wasn't occluded, just not in a safe place to infuse anything that could damage the vessel wall.

It's interesting that she doesn't have any X-rays to post to show off her daintily narrowed SVC; I wonder if it's more like scarring.

Man alive, that line! If you're allergic to chlorhexidine and have to special-order your occlusive dressings due to your sensitivity as well, wouldn't you add some classic-style silver patches to that order? You know, to protect the place where a central venous catheter is going from the filthy outside world, through your skin, and into your own personal circulatory system.



Not that that's going to fix whatever else she's doing with her fingernails and her sterile technique and her Bath & Body Works marinades, but it's at least something.

At her local hospital, her liver has something called phlegmon, which sounds like it's a crust that grows somewhere unmentionable. I appreciate that she posts these but again, couldn't tell you what most of it means other than "liver bad, probably infected"

"Phlegmon" means the inflamed area isn't collecting its pus into a neat little abscess (yet) so there's nothing to stick a drain in and the surgeon is sad.


I'm amazed that they keep replacing her central lines and sending her home to do... questionable things with them, over and over.

This is amazing work. Fast-forward ten years and insurance companies, maybe the larger hospitals, will each have a social media creeper who stalks their local "high utilizers" to figure out why they're continually decompensating and needing expensive readmissions. Not many people will know the historical reason why this person is affectionately referred to as "the Shill," though.

 

[roblox gay nazi sex club]

i suspect some hospitals probably have a few people on the inside like this already tbh. kiwifarms collects a large variety of people so students that end up becoming doctors n all of that are plausible. its just reporting it and actually acting on it i cant imagine.

 

[SNU]

Fuck she's close to finding out. Sepsis and lower resp infection requiring pressurized O2 can go either way even with modern medicine. It just takes one strain of bacteria that's resistant to the antibiotics and its over. Even if you live through it recovery is a bitch. Try doing daily activities when you're out of breath all the time. You'd hope that going through that would give some perspective but munchies never seem to realize how close to death they actually were

 

[Flourishing Pinecone ❧]

Dani has been crushing up pills and injecting them in her line. I guarantee it.

That weird bug "S. maltophilia is ubiquitous in aqueous environments, soil, and plants". It's in tap water. She's injecting tap water +/- poopy water into her line, and I'm going to bet she's mixed in some crushed up oxys too. Those will turn into glue into your pulmonary vessels quite nicely.

Dani is absolutely the next one in line for the death pool.

 

[The former Jack Donaghy]

I've always had a soft spot for Dani. She's just so deluded

 

[Pho Real]

Dani has been crushing up pills and injecting them in her line. I guarantee it.

That weird bug "S. maltophilia is ubiquitous in aqueous environments, soil, and plants". It's in tap water. She's injecting tap water +/- poopy water into her line, and I'm going to bet she's mixed in some crushed up oxys too. Those will turn into glue into your pulmonary vessels quite nicely.

Dani is absolutely the next one in line for the death pool.

And those low blood counts make me suspect she’s pulling a Kelly and bleeding herself out of her line. Between her infections and purposeful exsanguination being common in munchies even without easy access to large veins, no wonder they’re pushing for her to not have a line. But Dani never lets medical expertise slow her down, so I think it’s very likely she get to enjoy a slow and painful self-inflicted death via organ damage and opiate addiction.

 

[Xenomorph]

So what is the death toll from these ED munchies?
Seems like in the past 2 years quite a bit of em have kicked it.

 

[Crepidodera fulvicornis]

Can’t reply properly, but bravo, @Kate Farms Shill, this saga was worth the wait, beautiful narration, fantastic final twist, you should write a book like Oliver Sax with names changed, it would be best seller, I’m sure.
Semper fi, Kate.

 

[Kate Farms Shill]

Some kind citizens have pointed out I misinterpreted the latest central line saga. I kept saying Dani didn't know what she wanted and thought there should be a magical option where she keeps her line and gets to use it without getting sick from the line infection, and that's why she was whining that they wouldn't flush it and it might get occluded. I thought she infected the line on purpose but the whole keeping it / why won't they flush it thing went over my head. I thought the hospital was trying to avoid pulling the line for some reason related to her SVC issue or something.

The actual sequence of events: she infected the line, then fought them over removing it because of her SVC stenosis and scarring. After letting the infection brew for a week she whined and demanded they flush the line because there's no point saving it if she can't use it for TPN when she gets home. She was fully aware would flush the infection into her heart and make her septic and acknowledged that, and that is exactly what happened.

For some reason I just keep giving this mong the benefit of the doubt that she's literally too stupid to understand what she's doing. Maybe it's because i have some personal history with her or because after all these years, I still can't believe someone this stupid and transparent is convincing any doctor or nurse to do what she wants.

So what is the death toll from these ED munchies?
Seems like in the past 2 years quite a bit of em have kicked it.

Yeah I just expect two or three of them to die every year. Off the top of my head:
Emet / lgbtqadvocate. Suicide by VSED.
Jaquie / Chronically Jaquie. Multi-organ failure after her intestines wrapped around feeding tube (opiate constipation involved)
Susan / WhogivesaSDIT. Cause of death not released, likely polypharmacy mishap.
Tara / TubeFedDoctor. Polypharmacy mishap i think.
Cassandra / justmygenes. Unknown, likely sepsis + eating disorder.
Amanda Pape / geneticlly_bendy. Eating disorder.
Cherie / infection I think?
Amy / chronically.ams. Heart failure from eating disorder.
Kelly Carragher / kellybelly333. Unknown, drugs involved.
Tess / unknown, likely polypharmacy mishap.
Chelsea / tanzchelsea. Unknown, drugs involved.
Cheyanne / hospitalprincess. Infections following multi-visceral transplant after destroying her organs with an eating disorder.

 

[Sparkling Yuzu]

And she's fucking with it. People call her out for soaking in a bathtub full of scented bath products with a catheter that goes directly to her heart.

Do you think she thinks it's fine bc soap=clean? Imagine having those highly scented abortions in your heart. I can't even handle it on my skin without getting contact dermatitis, much as I love the obnoxious smells.

---

You might not like it, but this is what peak anorexia looks like.

 

[Flourishing Pinecone ❧]

Imagine having those highly scented abortions in your heart. I can't even handle it on my skin

I don't know what you were meaning to write but I enjoy that you must type abortion more often so that your device assumed that what's you wanted to say.

 

[The former Jack Donaghy]

I don't know what you were meaning to write but I enjoy that you must type abortion more often so that your device assumed that what's you wanted to say.

They're calling the soaps "highly scented abortions".

 

[Breadbear]

They're calling the soaps "highly scented abortions".

You know what? That's fair. I like creative descriptions.