WE HAVE ARRIVED.
Take Care of Maya has just been released. You know, that hellishly biased Netflix documentary that made Beata Kowalski look like the innocent victim of a cruel system that kidnapped her desperately ill child and implied it was a money-making scheme on the part of the hospital and the privatized CPS, when really she was on CPS’s radar for years because they thought she was overmedicating her child and pursuing extraordinarily dangerous and potentially fatal treatments for a non-fatal condition? That one. So we’ve already learned that Natalia was being treated by the same doctor as Maya at the same time with the same high-dose ketamine treatment, and she’s already claimed once that her mother was investigated by CPS on multiple occasions. She’s also mentioned that she was “medically kidnapped” by a hospital when she was 13 and told her parents had abandoned her and she would be placed in foster care. She is finally ready to tell us what happened. This brings us all the way back to Texas and Memorial Hermann Children’s Hospital, where she was being treated for the atrial septum defect in her heart. After being transferred from cardiac ward to general peds, a doctor on the ward found her claims of CRPS
doubtful for the same reason doctors suspected Maya’s diagnosis: she was playing in the child life area, showing no signs of pain or disability when distracted by something more fun to do, but consistently claimed to be in high pain. Maya, for the record, always answered that she was in 10/10 pain no matter how she was behaving when asked and it’s one of the things that made doctors think she was being coached by her mother. In Natalia’s case, as in Maya’s, they sent in a child abuse pediatrician to question the family and whatever Natalia’s mom said confirmed what the attending physician suspected, so during an emergency roundtable meeting the hospital decided to post police outside Natalia’s door and negotiate a separation trial. In the comments, Annie Grace is trying to pretend she cares about someone who isn’t herself (oh and use promo code ANNIEGRACE37 for 10% off your next Parade order, Natalia!)
In the comments, Morgan tells us all about the time she too was kidnapped
Here's the link she posted. Sometimes I forget how batshit Morgan is and it's always a pleasant surprise to remember!
Potsie Nicole is also here, in the instagram version.
Before we continue: I do to believe that Natalia had something wrong after the initial hand injury if only because her descriptions of both how the doctors reacted (calling in assorted specialists because her hand was visibly swollen, red, ice cold to the touch, and they didn’t know what to make of it)
and how her mother acted. Natalia’s mom initially wanted to just do occupational therapy per the hospital’s suggestions. She ignored the first doctor who said it was CRPS and that Natalia needed pain management. It was only after Natalia was unable to complete the intake assessment for OT because she was in too much pain that mom agreed pain management was necessary and took her to the pain clinic. There she had a reasonable treatment – a nerve block in the affected arm – so that she could then return to OT. This was successful and Natalia regained full function. Then she had the alleged “accident” that made the CRPS move to her legs, the one I can’t find any proof ever happened where she claimed a driver hit her school bus at suicide speed and threw her out of her seat. Again she was given pain management (the epidural catheter she had placed temporarily) and put in PT/OT where she regained use of her legs. So far so good. Even if the second incident was made up and Natalia’s pain condition, whatever it is, never affected her legs, even if she just wanted a wheelchair for show, her family’s response is wholly rational: she’s given non-narcotic pain management and put in therapies to regain function.
If you’ll recall from part one, Natalia had just moved to Texas and started a new school where she struggled to make friends, and this injury was the death knell to her social life. She never recovered socially from all this medical brouhaha and became “Hospital Girl” to her new peers, so she started seeking friendships with the other kids at the hospital. That is when she fully adopted the sick role. Right after she turned 13 she started using the wheelchair full time and pursuing a POTS diagnosis while talking about how other girls she knew at Memorial Hermann had dysautonomia. At this point I think Natalia was 100% the captain of our ship. All her free time is taken up by therapies and medical appointments, all her friends were sick, her hobbies revolved around her illness, and against this backdrop her illness became her full identity.
But I’d also like to bring something up: this was
before she got on ketamine. She did not have her first ketamine infusion until she got to Florida. So something was going on that pinged this attending physician to the situation. I feel comfortable saying at this point it was
not munchausen by proxy but Natalia acting up enough to get a few doctors to listen to her, and her mother believing it because not only does she not want to think her kid is lying, these here doctors are saying “your kid is totally sick and needs heart surgery.”
Also I just want to give some timeline context here because I initially thought she was also using the wheelchair here until I went back to check something. She was not. She had the wheelchair in the months prior to this hospitalization but that's when she got the epidural cath and was put back in PT/OT to get her to walk again. In the weeks after this, she went to Florida and that's when she suddenly started claiming the CRPS was back in her legs. She never got back out of the chair after that. okay, lets move on with her story.
Part 2, Natalia’s mom is allowed to enter the room with the police to retrieve her belongings and dramatically leaves behind a jacket “to remember her by” along with an iPad Mini. The attending tells her that mom has to go now and there will be no contact, but no explanation of what’s going on. Hospital staff then remove the phone and all her personal devices. She was then left with no means of communication and had to report directly to the nurse’s station if she needed food. The whole time she’s there every hospital employee who encounters her tells her the same things: your family has abandoned her and does not love her anymore and she will be placed in foster care. She decides to escape her room when there’s a code going on in another room and makes her way to the Ronald McDonald family room to use the phone in there. Knowing her mom “would’ve been smart to answer” an unknown caller so she calls her dad who she reminds us is not very smart. Dad picks up the phone and Natalia word vomits emotions at him. He dutifully informs her that he cannot speak to her and hangs up. That’s when she knew the doctors were telling the truth.
LET US AGAIN DISCUSS because is any of this sitting with you? No? Right so let’s just start with the phone calls and work our way backwards, shall we? I just wanna put out there that her dad is currently a regional VP in his company he's been with for as long as Natalia's been alive. So dude might not be a Rhodes Scholar but he’s not a bumbling incompetent retard. And even if he was, I'm not a parent, I don’t even particularly like children, but I got a gaggle of under-13-year-old nieces and nephews. I cannot under any circumstances imagine how this phone call happened between her and her parent. Even under threat of permanent legal separation if my kid is being held in the hospital like that, I don’t know that I would be able to control myself far enough to not at least
comfort the child. Even if it’s just “it’s okay baby, I can't talk but it’ll make sense soon.” And I would never, ever hang up. I would rather let that kid pour her heart out to me in a phone call and say nothing in response than hang up that call. And I’d record the shit out of it so everyone could hear what they did to my precious baby. Also her mom not picking up an unlisted number? What? My kid is held at the hospital and I don’t know what’s going on but eh, not gonna answer this call? She’s trying to make it seem like her parents would lose custody if they spoke to her at all, I guess, but in her version of this story the parents are not acting like any parents I have ever known. Even if caller ID didn’t identify it as a number associated with the hospital, I’d be picking it up just in case it was
something regarding my child and her care. If I was the CPS presiding over this I think I’d be more sus that her mother wasn’t rushing to answer any call than I would be that she picked up a call and comforted her child. Like she’s actually making them look more negligent.
The story of her meals, uh, did they disconnect her call button? Remember that Natalia, even back then, was claiming to be a fall risk from POTS and neurocardiogenic syncope and was freshly out of heart surgery but she has to independently make her way to the nurse’s station whenever she needs anything? I can't imagine any children's hospital ever being like "welp we think your mom is bad so you're on your own now." Also, staff searched her room and removed her personal iPad and the hardwired phone in the room, but not the iPad mini her mother, the one who was being investigated, handed over to her in the presence of LEOs?
And here's part 3: after a week and a half they have another roundtable and determine she’s not actually faking, she has every diagnosis in her chart, and that she’s akshully smarter than most doctors. She’s sent home to resume her normal life, but is enraged because they convinced her that her parents didn’t love her. The whole family needed years of psychiatric care to heal from this ten-day affair. This was one of two times that CPS came to investigate the family and now they don’t trust doctors. She claims to play dumb around doctors because “knowing too much is a red flag.” She’s leaving out details, of course. Nothing important that could change our perception of this story of course. She’s made dozens of “caption continues in comments posts up to now but this time she is absolutely beholden to instagram’s character limit and she cannot possibly make an extra post to fill us in on all these details. I think this is her way of handwaving away any part of this obviously fabricated and/or embellished story her ketamine-lesion brain couldn’t possibly prepare for, because it’s obvious to this writer that she ain’t one. She has no idea how to flesh the story out because it mostly isn'ttrue and she’s cribbing parts from what happened to Maya and parts from her imagination. There’s so many plot holes here that I’m not even poking my head into all of them. Like wtf with claiming that the whole hospital was instructed to constantly tell her that her family did not love her and had abandoned her? Girl, is this a trial separation or a psychological experiement that violates the Geneva Conventions? even the hideously biased netflix show made it clear that Maya did have supervised phone calls with her mother (with CPS there steering her mother away from discussing medical care because Beata could not stop asking Maya what medications she was being given and in what doses and trying to convince her daughter she was in excruciating pain) and that she was at least somewhat aware of what was going on. They have, I think, claimed that Maya was told that she was going into foster care but IDK if she was actually told that and again, the issue there was they had a STRONG reason to believe if Maya was released to Beata's care, Beata would overdose her. The comments on the facebook post here are... interesting. What does the story of the drunk mother have to do with anything? "this lady was drunk but I didn't think she was making her kid sick on purpose." Uh, yeah because medical child abuse wasn't the issue, the issue was mom was an alcoholic.
She posted this as a video series on Tiktok too, if you can get beyond her ear-cancer voice. For whatever reason she decided dentures were not on her to-do list when she made these so you get to hear her lisping and slurring through it while her tongue flicks out between her gums oh my god i do not like it. I don't know if she just didn't care, was doing that confrontational zoomer tiktok thing where they try to get people to send them "hate" so they can respond, or if she thought it made her look sicker. Also retard it's "in lieu of" and it means "instead of." You're thinking of "in light of."
The comments are a shitshow of MBP moms saying the same thing happened to them or munchies claiming some horrible treatment by doctors who didn't believe their pain, with a dusting of people saying "that documentary was biased bullshit", pointing out that it's incredibly rare for this to happen, and saying that false accusations of MBP are super common is like focusing on false rape claims instead of the overwhelming majority of actual rapes.
Sometimes the hunting grounds are so fertile, don't you find?
This comment is interesting because it implies the Atrial Septum Defect was minor and not causing any problems and that pursuing surgery for this nothingburger along with all the CRPS treatments and the wheelchairs and whatnot are why the attending pinged to Natalia's case.
Part two: the denture situation has not improved. In this version, mom's silent treatment as she packs her belongings is not because she can't tell Natalia what's going on without risking loss of custody but because she wants the doctors to have to explain it because she swore she'd never leave her daughter. Again, not a parent but
never in a million fucking years. You're separating me from my kid by force? I'm gonna tell her exactly what's going on and that I'm leaving her because they are forcing me. You can tase me, take me out in handcuffs for all I care, but my child is going to hear that this is not my choice from my own mouth. Especially if my kid is in the bed screaming at me to tell her what's wrong? Fuggedaboudit. There's no way my personal "fuck you" to that doctor trumps my instinct to comfort my child and explain what's going on. Also in this one she explains that "my personal iPad" they took away was the one her mom left her, and she was initially told she could talk to non-parental family members but "that was a lie." When did they promise this exactly, because in your timeline the nurse took your device immediately after the physician told you basically no information on what was going on?
In the braindead world of Tiktok even though people understand conceptually that what Natalia is saying about the doctors and nurses telling her that her parents abandoned her and do not love her makes no sense whatsoever, they believe it happened.
So in
light of the fact that she said the iPad taken away from her was the one her mother left and there was no other device in the room, let’s now look back on every post she made during this hospitalization. Here's the surgery.
And the aftermath where she had an NG tube.
Here's the "my view every day" photo where all she's doing is complaining that because of the surgery she can't see The Fault in Our Stars like she planned but at this point she says she's getting out that Friday and would see it, so she knew or assumed there was a definite end date to her hospitalization at this point.
There's a four day posting gap and then golytely, which is just an osmotic laxative used for clearing out constipation or as bowel prep. She's told us before that on a few occasions she had to run this through her feeding tube because of constipation.
The next day, her blood pressure is going crazy, but she doesn't offer an explanation why.
She's still in the hospital but she's got visitors.
She watches TV, she does crafts.
Maybe this vaguepost was her trying to get a message out but she's 13 and bored and I'd be more willing to believe she just thought this was so deep. None of this is at all unusual for her long boring hospital stays.
And finally she's home and all she has to say is she saw The Fault in Our Stars like she wanted to, then immediately went on a vacation home to Florida. Sooooooooooooooooo that doesn't look like "medical kidnapping." It looks like her usual malingering for attention. She had access to an internet-enabled device, she was acting totally normal, she had visitors, goofing off and posting selfies and she got discharged in time for her fun Florida trip she was looking forward to, which was the one where she said her legs stopped working and then she never got out of her wheelchair again.
A few days after she got back from Florida, she was back at Memorial Hermann not answering questions about why she was there. You know, the hospital that allegedly just kidnapped her a few days ago? I'd surely bring my daughter back there after they accused me of child abuse and had me escorted out by police! A few days later they moved to Tampa so she stopped going there, but reminded us that she'd still see her old doctors for regular appointments.
And she did. She makes an annual trip to Houston to see her cardiologist there, even though her cardio in tampa was apparently giving her everything she wanted. She even went as recently as this fall, according to tiktok. She claims she only goes outpatient and that even these outpatient trips fill her with anxiety but still. Why go back? You have new doctors in a new state and it allegedly causes intense distress. This is abnormal behavior. None of it makes sense!
Part 3: people are asking more questions in the comments because none of this makes sense, but she doesn't know the details of the legal side because "my mom doesn't like to relieve [sic] those intricate details." She claims her parents were playing "the long game" and that's why they acted like they were from the fucking moon and didn't try to comfort her in any way. In this one she "ran so fast" to the family room off unit dipshit oh gosh. I wonder why they didn't think you were totally incapacitated by 10/10 CPRS pain. Yes the answer is her mom was "so smart" and she knew she wouldn't pick up the phone for anything. Natalia, writer's tip. When you're writing fiction you really need to put yourself in your character's shoes
. Not just your Mary Sue self insert heroine who is smarter and much more capable than most doctors but every character, for every interaction. Take the hospital/CPS angle out of this. If you were a mother and your daughter was being held against her will and yours and you know that the "kidnapper" might call with further instructions you're picking up every telemarketer and wrong number that dials, no exceptions. It's not like they were expecting the phone call to be you - you didn't have a phone and they were told you weren't going to be in communication. The only phone calls they would be expecting regarding your care would be from hospital staff/CPS/police. She calls her dad "an idiot" this time and smugly crows that he picked up as she predicted because he's such a dumb dumb dummy and she's so much smarter than him too. Once again she runs to her mother with no sign of this crippling pain condition that will soon leave her wheelchair bound.
And we get a part four this time, complete with a punch line: she actually knew Maya IRL through her drug dealer with an MD, Dr. Hanna. She claims that both she and Maya were having infusions the day that Maya was "kidnapped." She knew Beata and saw her in the office that day, and that night Beata took Maya to Johns Hopkins where she would "evidently" be kidnapped. Natalia's mom tried to help Beata by telling her about her past experiences being investigated in Texas. She's going to be testifying in Maya's upcoming trial.
I hesitate to call her a liar on this last part - I didn't watch a glut of trial footage although I scanned through what was available on Law&Crime Network (Youtube) and didn't see Natalia. I also understand there was some last minute changes that kept quite a bit of testimony from being admitted into the trial. Searching google to see if she was discussed as a witness on reddit et al just brought up conversations about the documentary series about Ukrainian orphan Natalia Grace. So possible I missed it, possible she was meant to testify and was never called, and equally possible that like the rest of this story, it's mostly a fabrication she pulled out of her ass. I will say she did post about this whole debacle on facebook and tag her mom in it, so mom at least is aware that she's claiming this all happened.
And this brings me to the last part of this story I want to dissect. If any of this is true, I believe the parts where CPS came to speak to the family, and the part where her mother Myrna, possibly with her hackles already up from being investigated over the bullshit her smug histrionic retard of a daughter was pulling, came under the influence of crazy CRPS moms. This led her to a ketamine clinic in Tampa which led her to befriend Beata Kowalski, who was already well familiar with CPS investigations by the time Maya was taken from her. I think what we're really seeing is more of a codependent relationship between these two where they're backing up each others lies because they both benefit from it.
I went into this believing her, in a strange way. I thought she was another Kowalski case where the mother was insane and the kid too young to be faking. I thought it was just learned behavior, she didn't know any better or couldn't displease her mother by admitting it was a farce. When I found her the “medical kidnapping” posts were some of the first I saw and I thought, here’s a girl like Maya who was too young to be independently faking, whose mom was taking her to all these doctors to get her warrior mama asspat fix and coaching and drugging Natalia to get her to keep up the act. I have gone completely in the opposite way. I think Natalia made most or all of this “kidnapping” up because of the attention Maya’s case was getting and that she likely did know Maya through Dr. Hanna’s clinic. I think her initial injury was real, but since the first bout of PT she’s been fabricating and her parents believe her because what parent wouldn’t? She was in actual pain the first time and she has actual doctors agreeing with her for the first year and change she’s faking, which is when this story happened. Unfortunately I think what might have happened was her family got interviewed or something by CPS and this made Myrna retreat into the social media hugboxes with the other moms of munchie girls. We don’t know why her family moved back to Florida and specifically to Tampa. We do know her mom got a job there but did they relocate for work? Was houston not working out? Or did Myrna get in the facebook groups with the Beatas of the world and decide moving to Tampa so her daughter could see Dr. Hanna for “the best possible treatment” was necessary? But no, she's just another munchie, one who was believed at first probably because of her age and the fact that sickstagram-style munchausen was still a new phenomenon. Even with as long as I've been documenting girls in this exact pattern, I couldn't wrap my head around a 12 year old consistently faking well enough to get this degree of medical attention but now I think Natalia has always been the one at the helm.
Wew boy that was a lot of words.
