- Joined
- Jul 22, 2020
Is CPTSD not a real thing then? Or is it just being over diagnosed?
Community Munchausen's by Internet (Malingerers, Munchies, Spoonies, etc) - Feigning Illnesses for Attention
- Thread starter Petronella
- Start date
-
🐕 I am attempting to get the site runnning as fast as possible. If you are experiencing slow page load times, please report it.
- Joined
- Feb 3, 2024
It is a clinical term for something and therefore subjective just like BPD and ye odle assbergers, an invented archetype, useful of course but easy to misuse.
Every teenager has PTSD these days, and they aren't even shittalking they really do have it diagnosed. Just like ADHD for the previous generational harvest the new fashionable flavour is in. Complete social contagion, and that's not just me being contrarian because actual doctors are starting to get pissed off with it too (just check out the newspaper letters section, lots of angsty GPs).
They're too soft because if they aren't they get reamed by the parents I guess, eventually there will be some scandal to discredit it all like we had with the ritalin zombies last time around and things will re-cycle before the new taste arrives.
holyhandgrenade
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Nov 6, 2023
Long Covid is caused by brain damage
Now you can literally just troll munchies with "Long Covid" by calling them brain damaged lol
Now you can literally just troll munchies with "Long Covid" by calling them brain damaged lol
- Joined
- Feb 24, 2019
It is not a clinical diagnosis as far as I know, but I have not read the dsm-v-tr. They want to add it into the DSM and had a section discussing it in dsm v but it had not been added yet then. I have never had a patient diagnosed as cptsd. I've had PTSD with specificers.
- Joined
- Jan 3, 2023
It’s not in the DSM. My understanding is that clinicians started using it as a gentler label for assorted personality disordered behavior and people who make mental illness their identity (see: personality disorders) liked that because it makes them sound like they have a super special form of PTSD, and now people just self diagnose themselves with it.
- Joined
- Aug 8, 2018
Coming into this thread is often like a breath of fresh air, after cycling Animal Control. I remain stunned by the number of people, primarily women, who want to be sick. Most of the folks that I've met who actually have some of the more common conditions are frustrated with their symptoms, trying to navigate a normal life in spite of their diagnosis. In the meantime, the munchies are trying to milk attention and medical services to get out of having to do anything.
Chronic illnesses became a fashionable munch because they're often invisible and subjective, requiring a doctor to take the patient at their word. It makes them easier targets to fake.
Chronic illnesses became a fashionable munch because they're often invisible and subjective, requiring a doctor to take the patient at their word. It makes them easier targets to fake.
CastrationFrustration
kiwifarms.net
- Joined
- Oct 15, 2023
Side tangent: SNRIs like Duloxentine, when taken alongside other similar medications (SSRIs) can cause serotonin syndrome which can, in turn, cause seizures. Not saying she has serotonin syndrome but there's a lot of idiot doctors out there who will prescribe medications that have dangerous interactions with other medications.
Took multiple of these medications simultaneously, all under a doctor's "care", and ended up with unexplained tremors and what was ultimately deemed pseudo seizures. All symptoms disappeared with a year of tapering down to just having one medication instead of two in my system.
- Joined
- May 25, 2013
If the 'tism itself isn't disabling, the way you're treated because of it and the mental illnesses you develop as a result are
- Joined
- Aug 4, 2019
Girl I thought you were BPD. You're doing too much.
- Joined
- May 25, 2013
Where do you think the bpd came from
I think Oppositional Defiance Disorder needs to be retooled, because 9/10 it's slapped on some traumatized/abused kid acting out because their brains literally don't have the capacity to cope with shit like adults. It's basically a way to pathologize and blame kids for reacting in a common way kids react to trauma and abuse, because that's easier than confronting the fact that mom is an abusive narcissist or foster care has the reputation it does for a reason.
- Joined
- Aug 4, 2019
I don't think categorizing maladaptive behavior as a disorder blames the patient, quite the opposite. Bio and foster parents I talk to understand that this is inborn or a result of abuse. I'm sorry if someone has made you feel blamed for being abused as a kid.
- Joined
- May 25, 2013
Yeah that was not my experience as a kid lmao, I was one of the "bad kids" so it was my fault my parents treated me like shit. All the other kids in behavior disorder classes and alternative school were also just bad kids (nevermind that pretty much all of them had been abused or neglected in some way, I'm talking kids having cigarettes put out on them or watching their mother get shot dead). We got pills shoved down our throats and told constantly how much we needed to be perfect docile little Cinderellas to while our abusers continued to be asspatted and get away with shit.
Being autistic was also used as an excuse for why adults bullying and abusing children was ok. It's a systematic problem that's been going on for ages. It's still a problem and in the most extreme cases results in parents who murder their disabled children being treated more sympathetically than the kids they murdered.
- Joined
- May 15, 2020
I agree but I want to see more grown adults recording themselves doing writheful dances in public to prove how "autistic" they are and not this sad shit
- Joined
- Feb 21, 2018
Jessica DiStefano part 2. In part 1 we learned that Jessica has been trying to use her vague health complains to get out of her obligations since at least when she was a teenager and quit a retail gig alleging back pain (even though they offered her a desk job to stay. This is because she views work and school as impediments to her starfucker wannabe lifestyle of traveling the globe to stalk late 90s pop rock muppets Hanson while working on her own "career" where she will become famous for... something. With no talent, stage presences, or connections to her name, she spends a year fruitlessly seeking work from rent-a-talent-agencies only to be told she's got nothing going on and should not quit the day job she already quit. She eventually did go back to work but after a few years she found a man to support her, ramped up her illness claims, and quit again, now claiming daily vertigo-like episodes, migraines, and stomach pains that strangely do not stop her from doing anything fun. on her new public Sicksta, InvisibleChaosBlog, she has started to let us know about her multi-year quest to get diagnosed with something that will allow her to never work again. And we're about to hear just how funny that's gone.
Alright, we'll stop there. Next post, Jessica briefly gets the fame she wanted and promptly loses her damn mind.
Sorry for delay, various real-life issues curtailed my internet time and Kiwiflare kept eating the post when I tried to work on it.
First, we're back to Insta. She has seasonal affective disorder and also sleeps so late she’s barely awake for any daylight. Yeah winter in the mid-atlantic sucks and when the sun is out for those few hours a day, it’s usually under this thick soupy cloud layer so what you get is watery anemic bullshit purporting to be sunlight. It's almost tempting me to feel bad for her as I am a long term night shifter, but I have a feeling she'd be a lot less depressed if she did anything with her days other than focus on how bad she feels and how she can make it not be her fault she feels that way.
Obligatory “not faking sick, faking well.”
Please list all 50 of your diagnoses so I may laugh at you.
Backstory! She felt she was destined to be an actress, comparing herself to the great Lucille Ball, and she failed hard. So she tried her hand at modeling and we know she failed that. Slight hypermoblity when posing in certain ways is actually her for-real EDS she didn’t know about. She'll try to imply, occasionally, that she was going to acting auditions but I can't find any proof that she ever did anything beyond the interviews at her scammy model agencies where they pretended they thought she had potential.
She had a sleep study five years prior while claiming insomnia and a reversed circadian rhythm. She tried her best to stay up all night occupying her mind with movie titles, TV shows, band names, and whatever else she could think of like a fucking child who doesn’t want to sleep through Santa coming. Still she fell asleep for several hours, which was recorded by the monitoring equipment and NUH UH!!! She was awake the entire time and she knows it!!! Instead of insomnia they diagnosed her with mild sleep apnea and told her not to sleep on her back anymore. She decided not to press them about a CPAP after they told her she didn’t need one, I guess because that is both not fun and kinda fat-sounding.
Munchies talking about authenticity make me giggle.
Ah yes, the uniquely spoonie experience of being bored shitless during quarantine because you didn’t get to do anything fun for two years. No one else can possibly relate to this.
Never let a doctor tell you it’s all in your head. Her PCP said that about her POTS and she was totally wrong! Medical gaslighting is real!
I’d love to know more about her OCD diagnosis and how it manifests. Again claiming she looks much younger than her calendar age. If you told me this was a 14 year old child with no other information I would assume she was a hardcore out of control party girl who already knows what cocaine feels like and is in desperate need of firm parental guidance, not a fresh-faced innocent. If you showed me this photo shoot with no other info and asked me to guess an age I'd guess mid-20s. (Her unfiltered selfie up there I'd put right around her calendar age. Late 30s, maybe early 40s if you told me she was a skincare sperg.)
Her boyfriend moves and she can’t help him because she’s stuck in bed being sick. It sounds like she said she would and then blew him off last minute. She’s worried what his parents think of her now. Every single thing she does pushes her beyond her limits, guise, she feels so guilty!
Of course, she’s a Long COVID truther.
And a regular Covid Karen. There’s NO EXCUSE not to wear a mask, people!! She goes shopping but has to sit down in the furniture section almost immediately because she was dizzy, soaked in sweat, her tum-tum hurt and her heart rate wouldn’t come down. Lol, so, an anxiety attack over spooky virus because no one else was wearing a mask. Got it. Then her sciatica started acting up and it hurt real bad. She can barely move and now she has to cook dinner by which she means heat up nuggies.
Spoon theory. Only has the energy to eat and sleep. Sounds like depression, friendo.
She goes to “Osteopathic Manual Manipulation” which is not chiro. It’s done by a real doctor who did the same med school requirements as any other doctor but had to do a couple hundred extra hours on top of that to learn this technique, and it’s gentle pressure and safe manipulation of the joints rather than yanno. This bullshit. I don’t know how helpful it is but I’m guessing it’s not harming much and even if it’s placebo effect, fine whatever she feels better.
Repeating that she needs a psychiatrist that will accept and be empathetic to her many chronic illnesses. Lol what does this woman want? Her OCD, anxiety, and depression are apparently so bad she needs treatment for them, but this treatment can’t discuss how the symptoms of these mental illnesses are possibly affecting her physical health. She doesn't want them to say that hyperfixating on every nerve firing off and every tummy ache is why she feels like deep-fried doodoo caca every day, or that her POTS symptoms can 100% be chalked up to anxiety and lifestyle/depression-related deconditioning.
Even a fun post about going out in the snow she has to talk about her fingers being numb from her POTS and SFN.
None of these will fix a real illness but some will probably help you stop focusing on your symptoms and feel a lot better like meditation and not worrying about everything. Others like getting proper exercise and nutrition will absolutely help with the physical symptoms, even if you did actually have these diseases.
Another one claiming Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, this time to explain why her nose is so big.
Oh boy she’s really gonna do it! All fifty of her diagnoses! POTS, HSD which is still not EDS, “novel sjögrens” which is not Sjögrens, small fiber neuropathy, ME/CFS lol, fibro lol, migraines AND chronic headaches, PCOS, MCAS which isn’t diagnosed, IBS, OCD, depression, general AND social anxiety, SAD, PTSD, trichotillomania, GERD, a whole bunch of things like memory loss and dizziness that are symptoms, ADHD, some fat & sedentary combo platter options like metabolic syndrome, blood sugar regulation issues, and high cholesterol, Insomnia and DSPS, bruxism (symptom), TMJ, a history of lymphocytosis (past tense, not currently affecting you), eczema, psoriasis of the scalp (probably also eczema), chiari malformation (borderline, so not causing her any symptoms and only diagnosed because she demanded testing), CCI (“likely”), sciatica (try stretching and walking), costochondritis, 2 herniated disks in her neck, an osteophyte complex in the neck (bone spur, likely an incidental finding), reversal of the lordotic cervical spine curvature (commonly caused by bad posture and staring at your device all day, probably not causing any problems), mild heart murmur (almost definitely incidental and causing no problems), blood pooling (symptom), history of edema (like saying you have a history of cough because you get colds sometimes), pinched nerves, RLS, an umbilical hernia (probably incidental), Body Dysmorphia (lol), mitral valve regurgitation (guessing this is also super mild and was an incidental finding), thyroid nodules (harmless, incidental) sleep apnea (mild, told to change her sleep position), suspected occipital neuralgia (she doesn’t have this), cluster headaches (OR THIS), adrenal fatigue (suspected, also doesn’t exist), low blood sugar (you already said this one), depersonalization (symptom). Sooo that’s a big old mix of things, much of which sounds like it was found incidentally while she was running around trying to get diagnosed with things. We almost all have weird shit going on in our bodies that we don’t know about and most of the ones she mentioned are usually harmless or sound like they’re not causing her any problems. Like the story of the sleep study: she went in trying to get diagnosed with insomnia, ended up finding very mild sleep apnea. Probably wasn’t affecting her in any way she could actually identify and no one would have known she had it if she hadn’t been seeking a shinier prize. I suspect the neurologist is a woo doctor, based on the “novel Sjögrens” and a few other diseases in that list that probably don’t exist like ME/CFS and adrenal fatigue. Funny that she didn’t list PANDAS, I guess because she was too old to be “officially” diagnosed with this.
She rejoices when someone tells her she looks like crap because it means finally people will believe she’s as sick as she claims to be. Don’t tell her she looks healthy! She feels like she’s dying!!! In the comments, our insomnia queen tells us she easily sleeps 14 hours a day.
Familial dysautonomia. I wonder if her supposed Ashkenazi ancestry is why she brought up this extremely rare variant of dysautonomia that only happens in that population.
She was so great at her wholesale travel job that she sold four times her expected sales goal in her first year there. She got to travel everywhere – the timing lines up with all those expensive Hanson fanclub trips – but then she had to quit because of her many then-undiagnosed health issues and they wouldn’t let her transition to work from home. Now when she travels, she has to crash in bed for weeks. But It Was Worth It! (It was also listed as one of the reasons she was rejected for disability, because she was continuing to go on vacations while claiming she was too sick to perform any job.)
Her heart rate is fluctuating so much! I don't apple watch but that looks like 24 hours’ worth of her heart rate being normal and steady until a sudden jump right now. And apparently this jump just started a few minutes before the post. It looks to me like someone who spent all day doing fuck all then got up and did a bunch of activity to get a high reading. Getting her POTS diagnosis required many doctors. I love this little story here about how her first cardio never even told her he was diagnosing her deconditioned (because it isnt a diagnosis so much as it’s a fact, you don't regularly do cardio exercise and therefore can't tolerate it when made to) and just told her not to worry, followed by the one where the best electrophysiologist in the state totally had to google the disease she was trying to get diagnosed with because he’d never heard of it.
She and her boyfriend buy each other spoonie crap for Valentine’s Day! Man imagine if these two have a baby. It’s just gonna be a nose with limbs.
The thing is she's not terrible looking. Yeah she has that one very strong facial feature but a lot of people do and compared to the atomic fatties, BPD sideshows, and unhygienic greaseballs we usually see, Jessica is remarkably normal looking. She showers regularly, washes her clothes, and doesn't dress like a blind schizophrenic toddler. The bar in this forum is so, so low sometimes.
Around this time she starts posting illness content on Tiktok. She doesn’t have a Long Island accent so that’s great for me but she does has a vocal fry and kind of hisses her S sounds, “becausssssssse we’re too young to be ssssick.” It doesn’t dawn on her that perhaps going on about her 50+ diagnoses that she’ll never get better from no matter what is why a lot of people think she’s lying.
She had an 18 day long menstrual cycle.
Posting about trichotillomania and how she lied and said people pranked her and cut her hair to avoid admitting she was doing it. I always try to give these girls the benefit of the doubt that they're not lying about something and here we go, I believe she really had this one. She’s saying she pulled out the hairs that felt wrong to her, which is usually how that works and why the canopy hairs, which tend to be rougher because they get the brunt of environmental damage, etc, are usually targeted leading to the hallmark “Friar Tuck" baldness pattern. She is ashamed she does this and tries to hide that it was self-inflicted. Compare to Nicole Sams who discovered a youtuber who does have trichotillomania and showed off one very obviously new bald patch she'd created claiming she was totally blindsided to learn she had this condition, then immediately shaved her head and made it her whole identity, then promptly ditched it when she decided to skinwalk Mary Frey instead. In Jess's case, she does rarely mention this one going forward but always in the past tense, something she once did but has blessedly grown out of. I still believe her, because the thing that she claims made her stop was appropriate CBT and distraction tactics to keep her from getting at her hair until she had broken the cycle. Again compare to Nicole who claimed her habit was so bad she had to shave her hair to a #4 guard just to keep her from being physically able to pull it, who never showed any evidence of hair pulling again after she ditched that identity in college when training her ""service dogs"" that kept washing out became her new identity, yet couldn't come up with a single dumb explanation for why her hair grew back in thick and lush with no relapses.
More hair complaints – it started to grey early and thin at the temples because of stress and medications. You’re in your mid-30s, that’s kind of when that happens for a lot of us. She’s fat again, but it’s just water weight. “I feel like I’m aging while doing nothing.” wonder why that is.
She goes for dinner with her boyfriend and has a nice night with minimal symptoms, as is expected with this one.
But then she totally dislocates a rib and tells us that they're constantly subluxing and she barely notices anymore. She’s been on low dose naltrexone for six months for pain relief and it’s just starting to work.
Her eyelid skin being thin and stretchy is probably EDS and not normal human anatomy, where ones eyelid skin is generally very thin and stretchy. i mean not for nothing but this hooded eyelid comment is just kind of an internet phenomenon. The same way we all knew there were virgins with rage before the neologism "incel" was coined, those of us who had hooded lids knew that normal eye makeup looks would disappear into our brow bone without needing a specific term for the phenomenon. She understood this conceptually as she was constantly asking for makeup tips back on LJ and complaining that anything she tried ended up a smeared mess as soon as she blinked.
First, we're back to Insta. She has seasonal affective disorder and also sleeps so late she’s barely awake for any daylight. Yeah winter in the mid-atlantic sucks and when the sun is out for those few hours a day, it’s usually under this thick soupy cloud layer so what you get is watery anemic bullshit purporting to be sunlight. It's almost tempting me to feel bad for her as I am a long term night shifter, but I have a feeling she'd be a lot less depressed if she did anything with her days other than focus on how bad she feels and how she can make it not be her fault she feels that way.
Obligatory “not faking sick, faking well.”
Please list all 50 of your diagnoses so I may laugh at you.
Backstory! She felt she was destined to be an actress, comparing herself to the great Lucille Ball, and she failed hard. So she tried her hand at modeling and we know she failed that. Slight hypermoblity when posing in certain ways is actually her for-real EDS she didn’t know about. She'll try to imply, occasionally, that she was going to acting auditions but I can't find any proof that she ever did anything beyond the interviews at her scammy model agencies where they pretended they thought she had potential.
She had a sleep study five years prior while claiming insomnia and a reversed circadian rhythm. She tried her best to stay up all night occupying her mind with movie titles, TV shows, band names, and whatever else she could think of like a fucking child who doesn’t want to sleep through Santa coming. Still she fell asleep for several hours, which was recorded by the monitoring equipment and NUH UH!!! She was awake the entire time and she knows it!!! Instead of insomnia they diagnosed her with mild sleep apnea and told her not to sleep on her back anymore. She decided not to press them about a CPAP after they told her she didn’t need one, I guess because that is both not fun and kinda fat-sounding.
Munchies talking about authenticity make me giggle.
Ah yes, the uniquely spoonie experience of being bored shitless during quarantine because you didn’t get to do anything fun for two years. No one else can possibly relate to this.
Never let a doctor tell you it’s all in your head. Her PCP said that about her POTS and she was totally wrong! Medical gaslighting is real!
I’d love to know more about her OCD diagnosis and how it manifests. Again claiming she looks much younger than her calendar age. If you told me this was a 14 year old child with no other information I would assume she was a hardcore out of control party girl who already knows what cocaine feels like and is in desperate need of firm parental guidance, not a fresh-faced innocent. If you showed me this photo shoot with no other info and asked me to guess an age I'd guess mid-20s. (Her unfiltered selfie up there I'd put right around her calendar age. Late 30s, maybe early 40s if you told me she was a skincare sperg.)
Her boyfriend moves and she can’t help him because she’s stuck in bed being sick. It sounds like she said she would and then blew him off last minute. She’s worried what his parents think of her now. Every single thing she does pushes her beyond her limits, guise, she feels so guilty!
Of course, she’s a Long COVID truther.
And a regular Covid Karen. There’s NO EXCUSE not to wear a mask, people!! She goes shopping but has to sit down in the furniture section almost immediately because she was dizzy, soaked in sweat, her tum-tum hurt and her heart rate wouldn’t come down. Lol, so, an anxiety attack over spooky virus because no one else was wearing a mask. Got it. Then her sciatica started acting up and it hurt real bad. She can barely move and now she has to cook dinner by which she means heat up nuggies.
Spoon theory. Only has the energy to eat and sleep. Sounds like depression, friendo.
She goes to “Osteopathic Manual Manipulation” which is not chiro. It’s done by a real doctor who did the same med school requirements as any other doctor but had to do a couple hundred extra hours on top of that to learn this technique, and it’s gentle pressure and safe manipulation of the joints rather than yanno. This bullshit. I don’t know how helpful it is but I’m guessing it’s not harming much and even if it’s placebo effect, fine whatever she feels better.
Repeating that she needs a psychiatrist that will accept and be empathetic to her many chronic illnesses. Lol what does this woman want? Her OCD, anxiety, and depression are apparently so bad she needs treatment for them, but this treatment can’t discuss how the symptoms of these mental illnesses are possibly affecting her physical health. She doesn't want them to say that hyperfixating on every nerve firing off and every tummy ache is why she feels like deep-fried doodoo caca every day, or that her POTS symptoms can 100% be chalked up to anxiety and lifestyle/depression-related deconditioning.
Even a fun post about going out in the snow she has to talk about her fingers being numb from her POTS and SFN.
None of these will fix a real illness but some will probably help you stop focusing on your symptoms and feel a lot better like meditation and not worrying about everything. Others like getting proper exercise and nutrition will absolutely help with the physical symptoms, even if you did actually have these diseases.
Another one claiming Ashkenazi Jewish heritage, this time to explain why her nose is so big.
Oh boy she’s really gonna do it! All fifty of her diagnoses! POTS, HSD which is still not EDS, “novel sjögrens” which is not Sjögrens, small fiber neuropathy, ME/CFS lol, fibro lol, migraines AND chronic headaches, PCOS, MCAS which isn’t diagnosed, IBS, OCD, depression, general AND social anxiety, SAD, PTSD, trichotillomania, GERD, a whole bunch of things like memory loss and dizziness that are symptoms, ADHD, some fat & sedentary combo platter options like metabolic syndrome, blood sugar regulation issues, and high cholesterol, Insomnia and DSPS, bruxism (symptom), TMJ, a history of lymphocytosis (past tense, not currently affecting you), eczema, psoriasis of the scalp (probably also eczema), chiari malformation (borderline, so not causing her any symptoms and only diagnosed because she demanded testing), CCI (“likely”), sciatica (try stretching and walking), costochondritis, 2 herniated disks in her neck, an osteophyte complex in the neck (bone spur, likely an incidental finding), reversal of the lordotic cervical spine curvature (commonly caused by bad posture and staring at your device all day, probably not causing any problems), mild heart murmur (almost definitely incidental and causing no problems), blood pooling (symptom), history of edema (like saying you have a history of cough because you get colds sometimes), pinched nerves, RLS, an umbilical hernia (probably incidental), Body Dysmorphia (lol), mitral valve regurgitation (guessing this is also super mild and was an incidental finding), thyroid nodules (harmless, incidental) sleep apnea (mild, told to change her sleep position), suspected occipital neuralgia (she doesn’t have this), cluster headaches (OR THIS), adrenal fatigue (suspected, also doesn’t exist), low blood sugar (you already said this one), depersonalization (symptom). Sooo that’s a big old mix of things, much of which sounds like it was found incidentally while she was running around trying to get diagnosed with things. We almost all have weird shit going on in our bodies that we don’t know about and most of the ones she mentioned are usually harmless or sound like they’re not causing her any problems. Like the story of the sleep study: she went in trying to get diagnosed with insomnia, ended up finding very mild sleep apnea. Probably wasn’t affecting her in any way she could actually identify and no one would have known she had it if she hadn’t been seeking a shinier prize. I suspect the neurologist is a woo doctor, based on the “novel Sjögrens” and a few other diseases in that list that probably don’t exist like ME/CFS and adrenal fatigue. Funny that she didn’t list PANDAS, I guess because she was too old to be “officially” diagnosed with this.
She rejoices when someone tells her she looks like crap because it means finally people will believe she’s as sick as she claims to be. Don’t tell her she looks healthy! She feels like she’s dying!!! In the comments, our insomnia queen tells us she easily sleeps 14 hours a day.
Familial dysautonomia. I wonder if her supposed Ashkenazi ancestry is why she brought up this extremely rare variant of dysautonomia that only happens in that population.
She was so great at her wholesale travel job that she sold four times her expected sales goal in her first year there. She got to travel everywhere – the timing lines up with all those expensive Hanson fanclub trips – but then she had to quit because of her many then-undiagnosed health issues and they wouldn’t let her transition to work from home. Now when she travels, she has to crash in bed for weeks. But It Was Worth It! (It was also listed as one of the reasons she was rejected for disability, because she was continuing to go on vacations while claiming she was too sick to perform any job.)
Her heart rate is fluctuating so much! I don't apple watch but that looks like 24 hours’ worth of her heart rate being normal and steady until a sudden jump right now. And apparently this jump just started a few minutes before the post. It looks to me like someone who spent all day doing fuck all then got up and did a bunch of activity to get a high reading. Getting her POTS diagnosis required many doctors. I love this little story here about how her first cardio never even told her he was diagnosing her deconditioned (because it isnt a diagnosis so much as it’s a fact, you don't regularly do cardio exercise and therefore can't tolerate it when made to) and just told her not to worry, followed by the one where the best electrophysiologist in the state totally had to google the disease she was trying to get diagnosed with because he’d never heard of it.
She and her boyfriend buy each other spoonie crap for Valentine’s Day! Man imagine if these two have a baby. It’s just gonna be a nose with limbs.
The thing is she's not terrible looking. Yeah she has that one very strong facial feature but a lot of people do and compared to the atomic fatties, BPD sideshows, and unhygienic greaseballs we usually see, Jessica is remarkably normal looking. She showers regularly, washes her clothes, and doesn't dress like a blind schizophrenic toddler. The bar in this forum is so, so low sometimes.
Around this time she starts posting illness content on Tiktok. She doesn’t have a Long Island accent so that’s great for me but she does has a vocal fry and kind of hisses her S sounds, “becausssssssse we’re too young to be ssssick.” It doesn’t dawn on her that perhaps going on about her 50+ diagnoses that she’ll never get better from no matter what is why a lot of people think she’s lying.
She had an 18 day long menstrual cycle.
Posting about trichotillomania and how she lied and said people pranked her and cut her hair to avoid admitting she was doing it. I always try to give these girls the benefit of the doubt that they're not lying about something and here we go, I believe she really had this one. She’s saying she pulled out the hairs that felt wrong to her, which is usually how that works and why the canopy hairs, which tend to be rougher because they get the brunt of environmental damage, etc, are usually targeted leading to the hallmark “Friar Tuck" baldness pattern. She is ashamed she does this and tries to hide that it was self-inflicted. Compare to Nicole Sams who discovered a youtuber who does have trichotillomania and showed off one very obviously new bald patch she'd created claiming she was totally blindsided to learn she had this condition, then immediately shaved her head and made it her whole identity, then promptly ditched it when she decided to skinwalk Mary Frey instead. In Jess's case, she does rarely mention this one going forward but always in the past tense, something she once did but has blessedly grown out of. I still believe her, because the thing that she claims made her stop was appropriate CBT and distraction tactics to keep her from getting at her hair until she had broken the cycle. Again compare to Nicole who claimed her habit was so bad she had to shave her hair to a #4 guard just to keep her from being physically able to pull it, who never showed any evidence of hair pulling again after she ditched that identity in college when training her ""service dogs"" that kept washing out became her new identity, yet couldn't come up with a single dumb explanation for why her hair grew back in thick and lush with no relapses.
More hair complaints – it started to grey early and thin at the temples because of stress and medications. You’re in your mid-30s, that’s kind of when that happens for a lot of us. She’s fat again, but it’s just water weight. “I feel like I’m aging while doing nothing.” wonder why that is.
She goes for dinner with her boyfriend and has a nice night with minimal symptoms, as is expected with this one.
But then she totally dislocates a rib and tells us that they're constantly subluxing and she barely notices anymore. She’s been on low dose naltrexone for six months for pain relief and it’s just starting to work.
Her eyelid skin being thin and stretchy is probably EDS and not normal human anatomy, where ones eyelid skin is generally very thin and stretchy. i mean not for nothing but this hooded eyelid comment is just kind of an internet phenomenon. The same way we all knew there were virgins with rage before the neologism "incel" was coined, those of us who had hooded lids knew that normal eye makeup looks would disappear into our brow bone without needing a specific term for the phenomenon. She understood this conceptually as she was constantly asking for makeup tips back on LJ and complaining that anything she tried ended up a smeared mess as soon as she blinked.
And here’s where she starts Invisiblechaos.blog. In case you didn't realize it by now Jessica is really super in love with herself. She's the only child of coddling parents and was told her whole life that she was special and deserving of special treatment. She writes this blog with the belief that everyone is as interested in her plight as she is and she will get a large audience of sympathetic followers who will see she is very deserving of free money, unlimited Hanson Fanclub Experience trips, and all the special treatment she demands. Instead she got me, an internet masochist who derives pleasure from reading insane amounts of munchie cope and giving people the condensed soup version. Some of these it's hard to condense because she's so self-absorbed she has no idea how funny she sounds in nearly every line.
Here’s her bio intro. She has a ton of psych problems that caused symptoms all her life but that has nothing to do with her current health problems how dare u.
If you hover over “About me” it brings up a subcategory: required reading. I didn’t know this was going to be a commitment. It’s the first four blog posts she made, so we’ll go through them one by one.
First post she elaborates on the OCD: her clothes didn’t feel right and seams on her socks drove her anxiety up leading her to repeatedly adjust parts of her clothing, her handwriting wasn’t right and she’d go over it and erase things until she was satisfied, and she symmetrically touched objects. None of these are particularly out of the ordinary for OCD in young childhood nor are they the typical compulsions people claim when they fake OCD so I’ll give this one to her: she probably actually has it. She acknowledges that her anxiety caused her stomach problems to get worse (but still says they had some underlying physiological cause and the anxiety just exacerbated it) and had to be homeschooled for a year, but finished high school in person. Amazingly, she feels her best when she’s keeping herself busy, going out with friends, and not sitting around obsessing about every symptom. Herniated some disks in her neck, was sent to a chiro who fucked her up worse, I’ll believe it because chiros are quacks. Working a busy and very physical job with alternating day and night shifts makes her tired, whodathunkit? She then quit and got deconditioned by working in an office where she got sick all the time and then finds it hard to exercise. On the one year anniversary of securing the man she thought would marry her and let her do nothing all day, she massively ramped up the illness shit and quit her job. Her long-time doctor told her it was all her anxiety. Dr. Mommy googles her symptoms and decides she has dysautonomia. She never even heard of POTS until they diagnosed her – honest! She sees two geneticists, no one runs genetic testing, and she totally has HSD which is still not EDS. She’s glad she’s finding doctors who will put their ego aside and actually diagnose her with 50+ things. Go to her diagnosis tab to learn more. You’re the boss.
The diagnosis list is the same except a note about how she keeps some “more private” diagnoses off the list so there’s actually more than this.
If you mouse over the diagnoses list it brings up a subcategory called “Tally of Doctors.” I am ready for whatever this is.
It is an actual tally of how many doctors of each specialty she has had to see to amass this list of “diagnoses.” Eight cardiologists to get a POTS diagnosis holy shit girl, consider you don’t have it. Five neurologists, eight physical therapists, four PCPs and dermatologists, three psychiatrists. A total of 61 doctors. God in heaven.
Second blog post, all about medical gaslighting and how her doctors kept telling her that her “POTS” was actually just anxiety and lifestyle shit. A horrible gaslighting doctor is part of the reason that six and a half years after she applied, the gubmint still doesn’t think she’s too sick to work! And here's the story. She made an appointment at the Dysautonomia Clinic at NYU Langone Hospital after finding it through google. She has to have a new tilt table test, a QSART (sweat test), and tons of bloodwork and since they don’t take her insurance she has to pay out of pocket. She goes back for her second consult to get the results of all the testing and doesn’t have the money to pay them but they agree to see her anyway.
LMAO turns out it’s a super specialty clinic for Ashkenazi Jews with Familial Dysautonomia which she quickly says “akshully I’m part Ashkenazi!!!!” He tells her she doesn’t have have FD because she doesn’t have the symptoms. He goes on to say he doesn’t even believe POTS is really a form of dysautonomia at all but that it’s largely or entirely psychiatric and starts asking her why she was even googling it in the first place. This is a man who understands this was going to becoming a trend amongst young, social media addicted white women. She suddenly claims she’s having an unexplained fever every night and he points out that yep, your anxiety can do that too. “How could he not know the difference between a few symptoms and a syndrome?” IDK Ms. “a few points away from an EDS diagnosis”. She is told to see a psychotherapist but she knows she’s not just making it up and so does her psych who is also the one who diagnosed her with ME/CFS. Jesus wept. As a parting blow, this based physician writes a report to her regular cardio saying she doesn’t have any form of dysautonomia which makes her regular cardio agree that she doesn’t have it.
The next two are about her attempts to get on disability after she blew through all her FMLA time and quit her job. They are fucking art. Some of the funniest failmunchie content I’ve ever read in my life. She swears disability wasn’t in the plan after she quit and she just wanted a WFH job in travel but couldn’t find one. She even tried to start her own travel business. This was before she got diagnosed with anything other than OCD and IBS. Then she got the POTS diagnosis from the EP and said she was “jubilant” about it which, lolredflag. She went on Medicaid once COBRA* ran out, but not before accruing a shitload of outstanding debt both against herself and her family pursuing all these tests. That paid off, she could see whatever doctors she decided she needed and not worry. Your tax dollars etc etc. Getting a diagnosis didn’t help her and she kept getting worse and worse with not a single treatment on the market. Hey munchie, there’s kids dying every day of actual rare diseases for which there is no treatment. Pediatric cancers, assorted inborn errors of metabolism, DNA repair mechanism defects, all kinds of things where there’s not a single treatment that even slows it before it kills them in some manner so horrible it makes me question the existence of a righteous God. Sorry about your anxiety tho. (*Non-burger translation: a lot of Americans get their health benefits through their employer who is required to offer them if you work a certain number of hours per week - not for free, mind you. If you lose your job, COBRA allows you to pay to remain on your job's health benefits for a limited period to hopefully prevent a coverage gap. When her time period was up she went on Medicaid which is state subsidized insurance for low income people and in her state this means as long as the doctors she sees are in her policy network, she pays for very little of her care. Usually you have a fairly limited pool of doctors you can see on these low income policies. She's had to pay out of pocket for her specialty doctors like Maitland the allergist who is also an EDS expert somehow.)
She got a lolyer recommended by a family member who already went through this process (do tell Jess, does this run in the family?) and swears that at the start she just wanted disability short term so she could seek a treatment that let her get back to work – we know how that went. This guy’s wife is actually sick with some autoimmune hell and he tells her she’s going to have a hard time proving that she can’t work because she’s dizzy. Her lawyer collects all the medical records from all her doctors while she patiently waits and finally she’s called into her evaluation, which involves a medical and a psychiatric exam.
The doctor takes her blood pressure, sees a bunch of psychiatric and munchie diseases like fibro and CFS listed, then leaves. The psych goes better and totally believes her diagnoses. Still, she was denied disability in this first round because none of her illnesses prevented her from working. The medical doctor said she was exaggerating her POTS symptoms and Jess has no idea how he determined this. Because she’s been trying to play down her psych conditions and say they’re not affecting her to avoid the “it’s all in your head” line, the psych also says her mental health isn’t bad enough to stop her from working. After denial she went to even more doctors including a chronic lyme quack “just to rule it out.” Not helping your case there kiddo. Then the criteria for diagnosing hEDS changed to be stricter so her special zebra EDS became Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder. (I asked people who are familiar with the disability process and was told that the fact that she was able to schedule, get ready for, drive to, and attend all these appointments independently was probably used as additional proof that she has her shit together way more than she claims. She can’t do a work from home job she doesn’t even have to leave her bed for because of her fatigue and everything, but she can get out of bed, get ready, drive to the appointment, arrive on time, communicate with the doctor, and submit herself to testing when she might get a new shiny diagnosis out of it.)
In part 2 she has her appeals hearing and is assigned a judge who “doesn’t understand complex medical conditions.” Here they appoint a new MD and psych who have never met her to review all her records with the original hearing's doctors and make a determination. The appointed psychiatrist says she’s not sick because she’s always fine when there’s something fun to do like a dinner date. Again she can't understand what a red flag it is that her pile of medical paperwork is so large it requires its own wheeling briefcase because in her mind this just means she has abundant proof that she's very very sick.
When the medical doctors can’t agree on whether her POTS is real or as severe as she claims, they decide to call in a cardiologist and have a supplemental hearing about that. When that rolls around months later, the cardio writes that she has “fibromyalgia” in quotes and says POTS is not a disabling condition. Based. Her lawyer won’t speak up for her so against his legal advice, she speaks up for herself and says that cardios don’t know shit about POTS. She needs to have a neurologist testify. They allow it and schedule another hearing for that.
At this point she’s trying to get all her regular doctors to write letters saying she’s honestly super disabled but because she’s spent years finding a psych that would agree there’s no connection between her mental and physical health, that doctor refuses and says this has nothing to do with her mental health. Uhm hello??? I’m going to you for my 10/10 depression and OCD and now I’m ackshully suicidal! The doctor does not capitulate and says this has nothing to do with Jess's mental health therefore it doesn't involve them. Because she didn’t get what she wanted she decides she’ll just stop going to that doctor and soldier on without the psych care she desperately needed. Third hearing rolls around and this is NOT FAIR! She thinks it’s a good thing that she has the largest stack of medical records this disability lawyer has ever seen. Honey.
A vocational expert determined that given her “unreliable” health she can’t possibly work anywhere, but only after identifying several things she could do if the hours were flexible. So there are plenty of things she could do in a gig economy. Then the neurologist she demanded at the last hearing is called in. Surprise! He deferred to the familial dysautonomia expert who says she doesn't have dysautonomia at all, she has anxiety and google.
The psychiatrist is back now and mentions that she went to Jamaica to meet a boy band right after she applied for disability. She pre-paid for that trip before she applied for free money so she had to go even though she was so so sick. She had to skip some of the beach and pool time (but not any Hanson time, I’m sure). She only goes to a few concerts a year because they’re her happy place and it takes a week to recover from every show! The lawyer continues to ignore her furiously passing him notes so she starts crying and throwing a poopy pants toddler meltdown. That’ll show them!
This time she demands her own personal neurologist’s opinion be considered because the mean expert doesn’t believe her. Her doctors told her to do all that fun stuff she did. She didn’t even want to! She’s been going to more doctors and getting more diagnoses! She’s almost had cancer but then it turned out she didn’t have cancer at all and it was just random findings on many tests for other diseases she didn’t have! How can the judge not see how disabled she is??? Instead he’s annoyed that she’s not shutting the fuck up.
The judge finally dismisses her and two weeks later she gets a six page denial letter about how she’s making up her illnesses, she’s not sick, she can work full-time but doesn’t want to, and one of the leading experts on dysautonomia in the world doesn't think she has it at all. She gave the judge printouts of other POTS munchies on facebook complaining about this doctor but the judge didn’t even care, wow wonder why. Her lawyer writes an appeal on how unfair the judge was but also tells her she “doesn’t have enough to back up” her other 50+ diagnoses so they’ll stick to the POTS angle. This is kind of telling,
After over a year, the Court of Appeals responded to say they decided they weren’t reopening her case. She fired her lawyer over that but then couldn’t find someone to take her on so she had to go with the guy the lawyer she just fired recommended. This lawyer repeats that she doesn’t have enough proof with her other diseases because she just got diagnosed and then did nothing to try to treat them so she has nothing to back up her claim that she won’t get better. Gosh, she can’t work any job! Even keeping up her extensive social media presence every day is only possible because she can work at her own pace. She can’t even get anyone to read her blogs. Hello Jessica I am here to help! She admits she’s bleeding her parents dry, they’re still working at 70 years old to pay for her lifestyle and her mom has RA and other diseases and her dad is also arthritic.
Finally she says even if she gets paid she can’t afford to live here and she can’t afford to leave. No one she knows has had to wait this long to get their claim approved and she doesn’t understand why hers is taking so long.
Art. A triumph. This is why Jessica gets to be our friend. I also liked that when she posted links to this masterpiece on instagram people just straight up called her a munchie.
Here’s her bio intro. She has a ton of psych problems that caused symptoms all her life but that has nothing to do with her current health problems how dare u.
If you hover over “About me” it brings up a subcategory: required reading. I didn’t know this was going to be a commitment. It’s the first four blog posts she made, so we’ll go through them one by one.
First post she elaborates on the OCD: her clothes didn’t feel right and seams on her socks drove her anxiety up leading her to repeatedly adjust parts of her clothing, her handwriting wasn’t right and she’d go over it and erase things until she was satisfied, and she symmetrically touched objects. None of these are particularly out of the ordinary for OCD in young childhood nor are they the typical compulsions people claim when they fake OCD so I’ll give this one to her: she probably actually has it. She acknowledges that her anxiety caused her stomach problems to get worse (but still says they had some underlying physiological cause and the anxiety just exacerbated it) and had to be homeschooled for a year, but finished high school in person. Amazingly, she feels her best when she’s keeping herself busy, going out with friends, and not sitting around obsessing about every symptom. Herniated some disks in her neck, was sent to a chiro who fucked her up worse, I’ll believe it because chiros are quacks. Working a busy and very physical job with alternating day and night shifts makes her tired, whodathunkit? She then quit and got deconditioned by working in an office where she got sick all the time and then finds it hard to exercise. On the one year anniversary of securing the man she thought would marry her and let her do nothing all day, she massively ramped up the illness shit and quit her job. Her long-time doctor told her it was all her anxiety. Dr. Mommy googles her symptoms and decides she has dysautonomia. She never even heard of POTS until they diagnosed her – honest! She sees two geneticists, no one runs genetic testing, and she totally has HSD which is still not EDS. She’s glad she’s finding doctors who will put their ego aside and actually diagnose her with 50+ things. Go to her diagnosis tab to learn more. You’re the boss.
The diagnosis list is the same except a note about how she keeps some “more private” diagnoses off the list so there’s actually more than this.
If you mouse over the diagnoses list it brings up a subcategory called “Tally of Doctors.” I am ready for whatever this is.
It is an actual tally of how many doctors of each specialty she has had to see to amass this list of “diagnoses.” Eight cardiologists to get a POTS diagnosis holy shit girl, consider you don’t have it. Five neurologists, eight physical therapists, four PCPs and dermatologists, three psychiatrists. A total of 61 doctors. God in heaven.
Second blog post, all about medical gaslighting and how her doctors kept telling her that her “POTS” was actually just anxiety and lifestyle shit. A horrible gaslighting doctor is part of the reason that six and a half years after she applied, the gubmint still doesn’t think she’s too sick to work! And here's the story. She made an appointment at the Dysautonomia Clinic at NYU Langone Hospital after finding it through google. She has to have a new tilt table test, a QSART (sweat test), and tons of bloodwork and since they don’t take her insurance she has to pay out of pocket. She goes back for her second consult to get the results of all the testing and doesn’t have the money to pay them but they agree to see her anyway.
LMAO turns out it’s a super specialty clinic for Ashkenazi Jews with Familial Dysautonomia which she quickly says “akshully I’m part Ashkenazi!!!!” He tells her she doesn’t have have FD because she doesn’t have the symptoms. He goes on to say he doesn’t even believe POTS is really a form of dysautonomia at all but that it’s largely or entirely psychiatric and starts asking her why she was even googling it in the first place. This is a man who understands this was going to becoming a trend amongst young, social media addicted white women. She suddenly claims she’s having an unexplained fever every night and he points out that yep, your anxiety can do that too. “How could he not know the difference between a few symptoms and a syndrome?” IDK Ms. “a few points away from an EDS diagnosis”. She is told to see a psychotherapist but she knows she’s not just making it up and so does her psych who is also the one who diagnosed her with ME/CFS. Jesus wept. As a parting blow, this based physician writes a report to her regular cardio saying she doesn’t have any form of dysautonomia which makes her regular cardio agree that she doesn’t have it.
i kinda touched on this above but I thought it was worth getting into more detail. Familial dysautonomia doesn't sound that bad on paper right? We're so used to our POTSies raping the word dysautonomia until it's unconscious and bleeding that I almost missed how funny this actually is. FD has about 600 confirmed diagnosed cases throughout medical history and 350 currently living today. The symptoms are nothing like our little dainty fainties and include progressive facial and jaw deformity, mental retardation, an inability to sweat and a lack of pain sensation leading to self-mutilation. About half of diagnosed patients die by the time they're 30 from respiratory failure or spontaneous cardiac arrest when their nervous system just decides to stop nervousing one day.
This clinic she went to is the only one in the US for this illnesses which is because that is where there is a large concentration of Ashkenazis, the only population that carries the gene mutation for this. As an autosomal recessive genetic disease both parents have to carry the defective gene for a child to have a 1 in 4 chance of inheriting the illness. It's one of those illnesses that p. much only exist because of a genetic bottleneck where an insular population bred amongst themselves and kept creating new carriers and now Ashkenazis have as high as a 1 in 30 chance of being a carrier whereas any other population it's like astronomically slim. It doesn't matter if she has some Ashkenazi heritage because the odds of her even being a carrier for the mutation are the same as me secretly being J. K Rowling.
As an aside to this aside, I only heard about this long after the fact but Grace Harestad was posted to one of the subreddits I wasn't on (MunchSnark, I think) before I found her and some of the people discussing her there saw a post where she claimed she had familial dysautonomia. When people called her out she quickly claimed that she just meant normie POTS runs in her family then deleted the post. In her case I think she's just dumb and didn't bother to look into what FD actually is before posting that she had it, the same way Jessica had no idea that the super specialty clinic she found was not for little fainting munchie gals like her. But Grace also tried to say her family was Holocaust victims when they were actually in the Waffen-SS so I put no ridiculous victimhood lies past that one lol.
This clinic she went to is the only one in the US for this illnesses which is because that is where there is a large concentration of Ashkenazis, the only population that carries the gene mutation for this. As an autosomal recessive genetic disease both parents have to carry the defective gene for a child to have a 1 in 4 chance of inheriting the illness. It's one of those illnesses that p. much only exist because of a genetic bottleneck where an insular population bred amongst themselves and kept creating new carriers and now Ashkenazis have as high as a 1 in 30 chance of being a carrier whereas any other population it's like astronomically slim. It doesn't matter if she has some Ashkenazi heritage because the odds of her even being a carrier for the mutation are the same as me secretly being J. K Rowling.
As an aside to this aside, I only heard about this long after the fact but Grace Harestad was posted to one of the subreddits I wasn't on (MunchSnark, I think) before I found her and some of the people discussing her there saw a post where she claimed she had familial dysautonomia. When people called her out she quickly claimed that she just meant normie POTS runs in her family then deleted the post. In her case I think she's just dumb and didn't bother to look into what FD actually is before posting that she had it, the same way Jessica had no idea that the super specialty clinic she found was not for little fainting munchie gals like her. But Grace also tried to say her family was Holocaust victims when they were actually in the Waffen-SS so I put no ridiculous victimhood lies past that one lol.
The next two are about her attempts to get on disability after she blew through all her FMLA time and quit her job. They are fucking art. Some of the funniest failmunchie content I’ve ever read in my life. She swears disability wasn’t in the plan after she quit and she just wanted a WFH job in travel but couldn’t find one. She even tried to start her own travel business. This was before she got diagnosed with anything other than OCD and IBS. Then she got the POTS diagnosis from the EP and said she was “jubilant” about it which, lolredflag. She went on Medicaid once COBRA* ran out, but not before accruing a shitload of outstanding debt both against herself and her family pursuing all these tests. That paid off, she could see whatever doctors she decided she needed and not worry. Your tax dollars etc etc. Getting a diagnosis didn’t help her and she kept getting worse and worse with not a single treatment on the market. Hey munchie, there’s kids dying every day of actual rare diseases for which there is no treatment. Pediatric cancers, assorted inborn errors of metabolism, DNA repair mechanism defects, all kinds of things where there’s not a single treatment that even slows it before it kills them in some manner so horrible it makes me question the existence of a righteous God. Sorry about your anxiety tho. (*Non-burger translation: a lot of Americans get their health benefits through their employer who is required to offer them if you work a certain number of hours per week - not for free, mind you. If you lose your job, COBRA allows you to pay to remain on your job's health benefits for a limited period to hopefully prevent a coverage gap. When her time period was up she went on Medicaid which is state subsidized insurance for low income people and in her state this means as long as the doctors she sees are in her policy network, she pays for very little of her care. Usually you have a fairly limited pool of doctors you can see on these low income policies. She's had to pay out of pocket for her specialty doctors like Maitland the allergist who is also an EDS expert somehow.)
She got a lolyer recommended by a family member who already went through this process (do tell Jess, does this run in the family?) and swears that at the start she just wanted disability short term so she could seek a treatment that let her get back to work – we know how that went. This guy’s wife is actually sick with some autoimmune hell and he tells her she’s going to have a hard time proving that she can’t work because she’s dizzy. Her lawyer collects all the medical records from all her doctors while she patiently waits and finally she’s called into her evaluation, which involves a medical and a psychiatric exam.
The doctor takes her blood pressure, sees a bunch of psychiatric and munchie diseases like fibro and CFS listed, then leaves. The psych goes better and totally believes her diagnoses. Still, she was denied disability in this first round because none of her illnesses prevented her from working. The medical doctor said she was exaggerating her POTS symptoms and Jess has no idea how he determined this. Because she’s been trying to play down her psych conditions and say they’re not affecting her to avoid the “it’s all in your head” line, the psych also says her mental health isn’t bad enough to stop her from working. After denial she went to even more doctors including a chronic lyme quack “just to rule it out.” Not helping your case there kiddo. Then the criteria for diagnosing hEDS changed to be stricter so her special zebra EDS became Hypermobility Spectrum Disorder. (I asked people who are familiar with the disability process and was told that the fact that she was able to schedule, get ready for, drive to, and attend all these appointments independently was probably used as additional proof that she has her shit together way more than she claims. She can’t do a work from home job she doesn’t even have to leave her bed for because of her fatigue and everything, but she can get out of bed, get ready, drive to the appointment, arrive on time, communicate with the doctor, and submit herself to testing when she might get a new shiny diagnosis out of it.)
In part 2 she has her appeals hearing and is assigned a judge who “doesn’t understand complex medical conditions.” Here they appoint a new MD and psych who have never met her to review all her records with the original hearing's doctors and make a determination. The appointed psychiatrist says she’s not sick because she’s always fine when there’s something fun to do like a dinner date. Again she can't understand what a red flag it is that her pile of medical paperwork is so large it requires its own wheeling briefcase because in her mind this just means she has abundant proof that she's very very sick.
When the medical doctors can’t agree on whether her POTS is real or as severe as she claims, they decide to call in a cardiologist and have a supplemental hearing about that. When that rolls around months later, the cardio writes that she has “fibromyalgia” in quotes and says POTS is not a disabling condition. Based. Her lawyer won’t speak up for her so against his legal advice, she speaks up for herself and says that cardios don’t know shit about POTS. She needs to have a neurologist testify. They allow it and schedule another hearing for that.
At this point she’s trying to get all her regular doctors to write letters saying she’s honestly super disabled but because she’s spent years finding a psych that would agree there’s no connection between her mental and physical health, that doctor refuses and says this has nothing to do with her mental health. Uhm hello??? I’m going to you for my 10/10 depression and OCD and now I’m ackshully suicidal! The doctor does not capitulate and says this has nothing to do with Jess's mental health therefore it doesn't involve them. Because she didn’t get what she wanted she decides she’ll just stop going to that doctor and soldier on without the psych care she desperately needed. Third hearing rolls around and this is NOT FAIR! She thinks it’s a good thing that she has the largest stack of medical records this disability lawyer has ever seen. Honey.
A vocational expert determined that given her “unreliable” health she can’t possibly work anywhere, but only after identifying several things she could do if the hours were flexible. So there are plenty of things she could do in a gig economy. Then the neurologist she demanded at the last hearing is called in. Surprise! He deferred to the familial dysautonomia expert who says she doesn't have dysautonomia at all, she has anxiety and google.
The psychiatrist is back now and mentions that she went to Jamaica to meet a boy band right after she applied for disability. She pre-paid for that trip before she applied for free money so she had to go even though she was so so sick. She had to skip some of the beach and pool time (but not any Hanson time, I’m sure). She only goes to a few concerts a year because they’re her happy place and it takes a week to recover from every show! The lawyer continues to ignore her furiously passing him notes so she starts crying and throwing a poopy pants toddler meltdown. That’ll show them!
This time she demands her own personal neurologist’s opinion be considered because the mean expert doesn’t believe her. Her doctors told her to do all that fun stuff she did. She didn’t even want to! She’s been going to more doctors and getting more diagnoses! She’s almost had cancer but then it turned out she didn’t have cancer at all and it was just random findings on many tests for other diseases she didn’t have! How can the judge not see how disabled she is??? Instead he’s annoyed that she’s not shutting the fuck up.
The judge finally dismisses her and two weeks later she gets a six page denial letter about how she’s making up her illnesses, she’s not sick, she can work full-time but doesn’t want to, and one of the leading experts on dysautonomia in the world doesn't think she has it at all. She gave the judge printouts of other POTS munchies on facebook complaining about this doctor but the judge didn’t even care, wow wonder why. Her lawyer writes an appeal on how unfair the judge was but also tells her she “doesn’t have enough to back up” her other 50+ diagnoses so they’ll stick to the POTS angle. This is kind of telling,
After over a year, the Court of Appeals responded to say they decided they weren’t reopening her case. She fired her lawyer over that but then couldn’t find someone to take her on so she had to go with the guy the lawyer she just fired recommended. This lawyer repeats that she doesn’t have enough proof with her other diseases because she just got diagnosed and then did nothing to try to treat them so she has nothing to back up her claim that she won’t get better. Gosh, she can’t work any job! Even keeping up her extensive social media presence every day is only possible because she can work at her own pace. She can’t even get anyone to read her blogs. Hello Jessica I am here to help! She admits she’s bleeding her parents dry, they’re still working at 70 years old to pay for her lifestyle and her mom has RA and other diseases and her dad is also arthritic.
Finally she says even if she gets paid she can’t afford to live here and she can’t afford to leave. No one she knows has had to wait this long to get their claim approved and she doesn’t understand why hers is taking so long.
Art. A triumph. This is why Jessica gets to be our friend. I also liked that when she posted links to this masterpiece on instagram people just straight up called her a munchie.
I present to you my Jess conspiracy theory which may be totally off the mark. I try so hard to loosen the tin foil before I post but half a bottle of 80 proof writer juice later. . .
So we know from her entire post history that Jess wants to be famous for something, preferably acting. She compares herself sometimes to the main character in a TV program called The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel which is about a well-to-do housewife from New York who becomes a stand up comedienne. She also compares herself to Lucille Ball, whom she idolizes. She initially tried to become famous the old fashioned way with interviews at talent agencies back in the early 2000s but in the current age of social media that’s no longer strictly necessary. You can go viral on social media and either make a tidy living off revenue from that or even transition to more traditional media.
Jessica is aware that disability payments are insufficient to live off of especially in the New York metro area and has no interest in leaving the city. But she also knows if she wins she gets retro pay from the day she applied which is going to be given to her in a lump sum. At this point in the timeline she has six and a half years worth of payments coming to her if only she can convince a judge that she’s really truly too disabled to work. The amount she will be paid can vary a lot but let’s take her $800 figure. That’s over $60k she’s “owed” by this point.
I think her long term plan here is to get the retro pay and use it as seed money to put into her social media presence which she is confident would take off if only she had better equipment or a better place to film or whatever. Once she succeeds she doesn’t need to worry about if her payments are terminated or she has to pay back the retro pay because she has the career she wanted all along and they can’t claw that back. There's several reasons for this and I'll point them out as they come up in the future.
So we know from her entire post history that Jess wants to be famous for something, preferably acting. She compares herself sometimes to the main character in a TV program called The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel which is about a well-to-do housewife from New York who becomes a stand up comedienne. She also compares herself to Lucille Ball, whom she idolizes. She initially tried to become famous the old fashioned way with interviews at talent agencies back in the early 2000s but in the current age of social media that’s no longer strictly necessary. You can go viral on social media and either make a tidy living off revenue from that or even transition to more traditional media.
Jessica is aware that disability payments are insufficient to live off of especially in the New York metro area and has no interest in leaving the city. But she also knows if she wins she gets retro pay from the day she applied which is going to be given to her in a lump sum. At this point in the timeline she has six and a half years worth of payments coming to her if only she can convince a judge that she’s really truly too disabled to work. The amount she will be paid can vary a lot but let’s take her $800 figure. That’s over $60k she’s “owed” by this point.
I think her long term plan here is to get the retro pay and use it as seed money to put into her social media presence which she is confident would take off if only she had better equipment or a better place to film or whatever. Once she succeeds she doesn’t need to worry about if her payments are terminated or she has to pay back the retro pay because she has the career she wanted all along and they can’t claw that back. There's several reasons for this and I'll point them out as they come up in the future.
Back to her instagram. Her sacrum is twisted and now sitting hurts. The doctor can’t fix it because her body is too stubborn and she’s one of the hardest patients he’s ever had. A few doctors have said she’s their most challenging case. She doesn't realize this is those doctors blowing her off because they know nothing they do will fix her problems because they aren't real.
She fucks up her already fucked up sleep patterns even more.
Marvel at her crippling insomnia that makes her sleep too much when she's slept too little the night before. A true medical mystery.
And her heart rate that “nearly ends her” which is like, a brisk walk.
The hospital system stopped taking her insurance so now most of her doctors are no longer available. Her PCP, neurologist, and osteopath can stay.
New blog post, this one teaching all about POTS. Her #1 tip is to find a doctor who is “empathetic” and you may have to shop around a while to find one who gets it! Don’t be afraid to keep trying new ones until you find one that doesn’t blow you off as another anxious, deconditioned social media addict! Still trying to claim her HSD is just as bad and debilitating as EDS.
Her neurologist diagnosed her with ADHD after many people told her it was just OCD symptoms. He says plenty of people with POTS also have ADHD so he tests everyone. LMAO who is this guy? This was the only reason she failed classes. Apparently Tourette’s and PTSD are now the demon lovechild of OCD and ADHD. Cool.
In every makeup store, drug store, walmart, target, and many supermarkets for at least 25 years now.
She now has over 60 chronic conditions. Heather back in the comments to point out that she spends her day researching vague conditions to get diagnosed with and how much energy and effort all this takes while she claims she can’t work. SHE. DOESN’T. HAVE. MUNCHAUSEN.
Another blog post about things you learn after you get sick. Her job wouldn’t let her take all the time off she wanted, her friends thought she was exaggerating and faking and don’t even ask her how she’s doing anymore, she lost the hobbies she never really had anyway. No one will pay her free government money to sit on her ass doing nothing and her lawyer told her to stop her jewelry store since it proves she’s capable of working. Her savings is gone and she’s learned to be very savvy with what she has left (previously admit her parents pay for everything). Doctor’s appointments are now fun exciting outings because she’s not allowed to do anything fun or else disability will tell her she just doesn’t want to work.
Man her stinkface was even funnier when she was fat. This looks like some AI-generated art. It wasn’t fat, it was inflammation and that’s why weight watchers worked wonders lol.
No one knows why ME/CFS affects women disproportionately. No one? I feel like some of us figured it out.
All of these apply to her. She doesn’t want to work, by her own admission like a dozen doctors have said it’s in her head including the leader of a dysautonomia clinic, you don’t make multiple social media platforms for your eyefuck selfies and sob stories if you don’t love attention (not to mention her dreams of real life fame), her illnesses fuck off whenever there’s something fun to do, and if she wanted to she could end this all tomorrow with lifestyle changes and therapy.
If I don’t figure out who her neurologist enabler is by the end of this I will consider myself a total failure. Even though he’s the one treating her for her tachycardia and she’s complaining of insomnia, he’s also starting her on stims for the ADHD he just decided she had and fatigue. Her pelvic floor is probably fucked.
Goes to Sedona in December 2017, three years after she applies for disability. Why don’t they understand that I can’t work?! She promises they only drove from point to point and took photos, no hiking whatsoever. So so far we know of three vacations she went on after applying for disability: the Hanson fanclub experience in Jamaica, January 2015; this trip to Sedona in December 2017; and the ill-fated Canada excursion in 2018.
Another blog, this one about Long Covid and her soapbox about how there’s no treatments for her dysautoxiety and she’s yet to find a cardiologist she can “use.” Interesting choice of words there. She’s bitter that covid patients are getting research and treatment when POTS patients get ignored once again. But ahhh, she tells us the doctor she does see is the only one on Long Island recommended by Dysautonomia International.
Patchougue is on Long Island. Hello Dr. Mark Gudesblatt of South Shore Neurologic Associates. Reviews are the usual mix of people saying he’s a genius who really cared about them when every other doctor said it was in their heads, and people saying he treats them like research subjects and constantly finds new problems that need treatment at every appointment. Also his true believers screech at people who write negative reviews because he’s the only doctor that knows the truth. LMAO.
I like this guy pointing out that all the reviews that speak of him as a genius are women and the ones saying “this dude’s insane” are men. So close, my friend, but the issue is not that Dr. G is seducing the ladies but that he’s making bank telling sedentary, deconditioned women that their minor discomfort is a serious illness they’ll never recover from which is what they want to hear.
And this one. Why do you know anything about your doctor’s personal life?
None of her friends can even name any of her health conditions even though it’s all she can talk about. Why doesn’t anyone want to hang out with me anymore?????
Imagine being so sensitive to criticism that a “bullying” teacher telling you there’s no blue flowers thirty years ago still weighs heavy on your mind.
I mean she has a lot to be depressed about, in that she does nothing with her life all day and that’s depressing as fuck. It’s a cage of her own design but it’s real easy to induce depression just by having no schedule, nothing to do, nothing to look forward to, laying in bed sleeping all day.
In the aftermath of the American Civil War visible disabilities became something of a status symbol amongst men because it usually meant (or implied) that you had fought in the war and survived. This can be seen in many, many old portraits. Here's one of a double amputee showing off his empty sleeves and another in a wheelchair. It's not unusual to see a family portrait where Dad is holding up his crutch or prosthetic leg front and center so everyone can see it. There's even an argument to be made that childhood polio victims from the 40s-50s benefitted from this same phenomenon as they were innocent babies when they caught an unthinking virus and became symbols of both the cruel hand of fate and, post-vaccine, the power of man to overcome it. But what do I know? I'm just a medical historian. “Our immune systems are shamed.” What does that mean? I’m guessing this is a chimp out because everyone won’t wear masks to quell her anxiety.
Blindness saga incoming?! Bragging about how thick and strong her glasses are and about how she was told she might want to look into Lasik in the future, but now she cant because of her EDS and “novel Sjögrens.” Because it can’t just be dry eye or the dehydration we already know she has, it has to be a totally novel autoimmune disease that happens to mimic Sjögrens. Like her hair, her glasses are a “security blanket” to her.
A blog about hEDS vs. HSD and I already know it’s gonna be a gem. Like all of these girls, she swears she never heard of these diseases until she was already getting diagnosed with them. She doesn’t like the Beighton test because it only evaluates a few joints by which she means, she was marked as negative for hers because only her elbows and knees are hypermobile and she was only given one measly point per elbow and knee even though they’re way more hypermobile than they needed to be to “pass”. She should have been given full marks! (I would like to point out that it wouldn’t surprise me if she had a stretching compulsion related to her OCD, something like symmetrically shifting her weight from leg to leg and kind of pressing through the joint and then doing the same with her elbows.) She also complains that some of the things on the second part she didn’t get points on because they didn’t test, like an umbilical hernia that was only found on ultrasound. I’m guessing she had a tiny little M&M of a hernia she was told was nothing and someone with a real CT disease would have one that was obvious.
Her first geneticist said she didn’t have EDS and wouldn’t even do the Beighton so she went to a different one that “specializes in diagnosing EDS.” Again, this man overlooked so many of her problems that would have proven she was a dazzling zebra. She asked about getting tested for vEDS because some people in her family had aortic aneurisms and was told not to worry about it. VEDS has a “type” and she ain’t it. Importantly, almost everyone with vEDS has an abnormally small and narrow nose and she’s got that big ole beak. Aortic aneurism is pretty common in older people (most common risk factors: smoking, hypertension, being a sedentary fatass.) He tells her she has HSD but is ‘just shy’ of an EDS diagnosis which means she does not fucking have it.
She now thinks that she should have been tested for the rare variants just to rule them out so she’ll be going to yet another geneticist to get that done because the one that diagnosed her HSD stopped treating EDS patients. So it should come as no surprise that I lurk a few EDS groups on facebook et al, and I’ve seen a growing trend of hEDS zebras complaining that their geneticists abruptly decided that they will no longer see HSD/hEDS patients, or that the University Hospital of Wherever doesn’t accept hEDS patients in their EDS clinic anymore. A few have posted the notices they were sent that they’re no longer welcome there. It’s very funny. So here she says that HSD is what you get diagnosed with when you’re hypermobile but they’ve ruled out EDS which is what happened to her.
Her problem with the changes, of course, is that it meant a lot of people who don’t fit the new stricter criteria lost their diagnoses and now have to contend with the less prestigious HSD diagnosis, and this makes it harder to qualify for disability. It’s NOT FAIR because HSD is just as bad as EDS and can actually be much worse!!! The consortium caved into whining zebras and decided that if you were already diagnosed then you were “grandfathered in” to the diagnosis – can you fucking imagine this with any other illness? But if you get reevaluated and they find you don’t meet the criteria for the diagnosis they can strip you of your special zebra status.
The chance of passing on EDS to a child depends on which type and since the gene for hEDS has not been found (and it likely doesn’t exist the way the others do) then the odds of passing it on are a lot more complicated. I’ve heard theories that it’s actually a bunch of gene mutations that alone don’t do much, but the accumulation of them causes an EDS-like disorder. And yes, she’s just mad because this means she doesn’t get the special zebra treatment and got denied for disability because of it and she blames the geneticists for not doing a thorough enough job. She’s more hypermobile than people with real EDS!!!!
Other doctors who are not geneticists specializing in connective tissue disorders told her those doctors were totally wrong. They marked her skin not stretchy when it totally is. Could it have anything to do with aging and rapid weight loss? “What I have has to be more than just HSD.” Yep, it’s called “munchausen.”
Ahh there it is. “I don’t know how to stand without locking my knees.” Yeah it’s an OCD/anxiety thing she has been doing so long she doesn’t recognize it as such. Why can’t she learn how to stand without locking her knees as an adult? And didn’t she just say her fingers were determined to not be hypermobile? The stretchmarks just sound like she was a chunky kid. The “issues with my thumbs” thing just sounds like shes got what we used to call “Mario Thumb” from using her phone all day. My favorite part of this whole screed, the entire thing, is where she claims that she doesn’t hit enough hypermobility points because after “constant subluxations and dislocations” that she didn’t even know about, those joints have now developed arthritis and gotten stiff. I love this woman’s blog more than I can express. It’s like a cornucopia of cope.
Do any of these girls know that most disabled and chronically ill people work? Wishing multiple chronic illnesses on people who doubt her.
Wishing “long covid” on people who don’t wear masks. Good thing it doesn’t exist.
She starts adderall even though she has unregulated POTS with unstable tachycardia because she has the tireds. She’s too fatigued to even look at her phone or pick up her head, says the woman typing out 18 paragraph posts about how she should be diagnosed with the trendy disease she wants. Having gotten stims, sweet sweet stims, she can suddenly go bowling. She had lots of pain but weirdly no dislocations or almost passing out from her POTS or anything. Then they went thrifting and she opened a new etsy account to sell some of the cool things she’s found. I wonder how this will affect the outcome of her next disability appeal, when she’s not only going on fun bowling outings and shopping but generating income from an etsy store. Gonna guess they say if she can do all that then she can do a work from home job.
She doesn’t reach out to these people or show any interest in their lives and yet she expects them to talk to her and take great interest in her many diagnoses to “show support.” Yanno, maybe married people with children and jobs and mortgages have more important things to worry about than hearing you whine on a loop about your pain, fatigue, and inability to get disability payments?
I didn’t know bitchface was a disability.
She fucks up her already fucked up sleep patterns even more.
Marvel at her crippling insomnia that makes her sleep too much when she's slept too little the night before. A true medical mystery.
And her heart rate that “nearly ends her” which is like, a brisk walk.
The hospital system stopped taking her insurance so now most of her doctors are no longer available. Her PCP, neurologist, and osteopath can stay.
New blog post, this one teaching all about POTS. Her #1 tip is to find a doctor who is “empathetic” and you may have to shop around a while to find one who gets it! Don’t be afraid to keep trying new ones until you find one that doesn’t blow you off as another anxious, deconditioned social media addict! Still trying to claim her HSD is just as bad and debilitating as EDS.
Her neurologist diagnosed her with ADHD after many people told her it was just OCD symptoms. He says plenty of people with POTS also have ADHD so he tests everyone. LMAO who is this guy? This was the only reason she failed classes. Apparently Tourette’s and PTSD are now the demon lovechild of OCD and ADHD. Cool.
In every makeup store, drug store, walmart, target, and many supermarkets for at least 25 years now.
She now has over 60 chronic conditions. Heather back in the comments to point out that she spends her day researching vague conditions to get diagnosed with and how much energy and effort all this takes while she claims she can’t work. SHE. DOESN’T. HAVE. MUNCHAUSEN.
Another blog post about things you learn after you get sick. Her job wouldn’t let her take all the time off she wanted, her friends thought she was exaggerating and faking and don’t even ask her how she’s doing anymore, she lost the hobbies she never really had anyway. No one will pay her free government money to sit on her ass doing nothing and her lawyer told her to stop her jewelry store since it proves she’s capable of working. Her savings is gone and she’s learned to be very savvy with what she has left (previously admit her parents pay for everything). Doctor’s appointments are now fun exciting outings because she’s not allowed to do anything fun or else disability will tell her she just doesn’t want to work.
Man her stinkface was even funnier when she was fat. This looks like some AI-generated art. It wasn’t fat, it was inflammation and that’s why weight watchers worked wonders lol.
No one knows why ME/CFS affects women disproportionately. No one? I feel like some of us figured it out.
All of these apply to her. She doesn’t want to work, by her own admission like a dozen doctors have said it’s in her head including the leader of a dysautonomia clinic, you don’t make multiple social media platforms for your eyefuck selfies and sob stories if you don’t love attention (not to mention her dreams of real life fame), her illnesses fuck off whenever there’s something fun to do, and if she wanted to she could end this all tomorrow with lifestyle changes and therapy.
If I don’t figure out who her neurologist enabler is by the end of this I will consider myself a total failure. Even though he’s the one treating her for her tachycardia and she’s complaining of insomnia, he’s also starting her on stims for the ADHD he just decided she had and fatigue. Her pelvic floor is probably fucked.
Goes to Sedona in December 2017, three years after she applies for disability. Why don’t they understand that I can’t work?! She promises they only drove from point to point and took photos, no hiking whatsoever. So so far we know of three vacations she went on after applying for disability: the Hanson fanclub experience in Jamaica, January 2015; this trip to Sedona in December 2017; and the ill-fated Canada excursion in 2018.
Another blog, this one about Long Covid and her soapbox about how there’s no treatments for her dysautoxiety and she’s yet to find a cardiologist she can “use.” Interesting choice of words there. She’s bitter that covid patients are getting research and treatment when POTS patients get ignored once again. But ahhh, she tells us the doctor she does see is the only one on Long Island recommended by Dysautonomia International.
Patchougue is on Long Island. Hello Dr. Mark Gudesblatt of South Shore Neurologic Associates. Reviews are the usual mix of people saying he’s a genius who really cared about them when every other doctor said it was in their heads, and people saying he treats them like research subjects and constantly finds new problems that need treatment at every appointment. Also his true believers screech at people who write negative reviews because he’s the only doctor that knows the truth. LMAO.
I like this guy pointing out that all the reviews that speak of him as a genius are women and the ones saying “this dude’s insane” are men. So close, my friend, but the issue is not that Dr. G is seducing the ladies but that he’s making bank telling sedentary, deconditioned women that their minor discomfort is a serious illness they’ll never recover from which is what they want to hear.
And this one. Why do you know anything about your doctor’s personal life?
None of her friends can even name any of her health conditions even though it’s all she can talk about. Why doesn’t anyone want to hang out with me anymore?????
Imagine being so sensitive to criticism that a “bullying” teacher telling you there’s no blue flowers thirty years ago still weighs heavy on your mind.
I mean she has a lot to be depressed about, in that she does nothing with her life all day and that’s depressing as fuck. It’s a cage of her own design but it’s real easy to induce depression just by having no schedule, nothing to do, nothing to look forward to, laying in bed sleeping all day.
In the aftermath of the American Civil War visible disabilities became something of a status symbol amongst men because it usually meant (or implied) that you had fought in the war and survived. This can be seen in many, many old portraits. Here's one of a double amputee showing off his empty sleeves and another in a wheelchair. It's not unusual to see a family portrait where Dad is holding up his crutch or prosthetic leg front and center so everyone can see it. There's even an argument to be made that childhood polio victims from the 40s-50s benefitted from this same phenomenon as they were innocent babies when they caught an unthinking virus and became symbols of both the cruel hand of fate and, post-vaccine, the power of man to overcome it. But what do I know? I'm just a medical historian. “Our immune systems are shamed.” What does that mean? I’m guessing this is a chimp out because everyone won’t wear masks to quell her anxiety.
Blindness saga incoming?! Bragging about how thick and strong her glasses are and about how she was told she might want to look into Lasik in the future, but now she cant because of her EDS and “novel Sjögrens.” Because it can’t just be dry eye or the dehydration we already know she has, it has to be a totally novel autoimmune disease that happens to mimic Sjögrens. Like her hair, her glasses are a “security blanket” to her.
A blog about hEDS vs. HSD and I already know it’s gonna be a gem. Like all of these girls, she swears she never heard of these diseases until she was already getting diagnosed with them. She doesn’t like the Beighton test because it only evaluates a few joints by which she means, she was marked as negative for hers because only her elbows and knees are hypermobile and she was only given one measly point per elbow and knee even though they’re way more hypermobile than they needed to be to “pass”. She should have been given full marks! (I would like to point out that it wouldn’t surprise me if she had a stretching compulsion related to her OCD, something like symmetrically shifting her weight from leg to leg and kind of pressing through the joint and then doing the same with her elbows.) She also complains that some of the things on the second part she didn’t get points on because they didn’t test, like an umbilical hernia that was only found on ultrasound. I’m guessing she had a tiny little M&M of a hernia she was told was nothing and someone with a real CT disease would have one that was obvious.
Her first geneticist said she didn’t have EDS and wouldn’t even do the Beighton so she went to a different one that “specializes in diagnosing EDS.” Again, this man overlooked so many of her problems that would have proven she was a dazzling zebra. She asked about getting tested for vEDS because some people in her family had aortic aneurisms and was told not to worry about it. VEDS has a “type” and she ain’t it. Importantly, almost everyone with vEDS has an abnormally small and narrow nose and she’s got that big ole beak. Aortic aneurism is pretty common in older people (most common risk factors: smoking, hypertension, being a sedentary fatass.) He tells her she has HSD but is ‘just shy’ of an EDS diagnosis which means she does not fucking have it.
She now thinks that she should have been tested for the rare variants just to rule them out so she’ll be going to yet another geneticist to get that done because the one that diagnosed her HSD stopped treating EDS patients. So it should come as no surprise that I lurk a few EDS groups on facebook et al, and I’ve seen a growing trend of hEDS zebras complaining that their geneticists abruptly decided that they will no longer see HSD/hEDS patients, or that the University Hospital of Wherever doesn’t accept hEDS patients in their EDS clinic anymore. A few have posted the notices they were sent that they’re no longer welcome there. It’s very funny. So here she says that HSD is what you get diagnosed with when you’re hypermobile but they’ve ruled out EDS which is what happened to her.
Her problem with the changes, of course, is that it meant a lot of people who don’t fit the new stricter criteria lost their diagnoses and now have to contend with the less prestigious HSD diagnosis, and this makes it harder to qualify for disability. It’s NOT FAIR because HSD is just as bad as EDS and can actually be much worse!!! The consortium caved into whining zebras and decided that if you were already diagnosed then you were “grandfathered in” to the diagnosis – can you fucking imagine this with any other illness? But if you get reevaluated and they find you don’t meet the criteria for the diagnosis they can strip you of your special zebra status.
The chance of passing on EDS to a child depends on which type and since the gene for hEDS has not been found (and it likely doesn’t exist the way the others do) then the odds of passing it on are a lot more complicated. I’ve heard theories that it’s actually a bunch of gene mutations that alone don’t do much, but the accumulation of them causes an EDS-like disorder. And yes, she’s just mad because this means she doesn’t get the special zebra treatment and got denied for disability because of it and she blames the geneticists for not doing a thorough enough job. She’s more hypermobile than people with real EDS!!!!
Other doctors who are not geneticists specializing in connective tissue disorders told her those doctors were totally wrong. They marked her skin not stretchy when it totally is. Could it have anything to do with aging and rapid weight loss? “What I have has to be more than just HSD.” Yep, it’s called “munchausen.”
Ahh there it is. “I don’t know how to stand without locking my knees.” Yeah it’s an OCD/anxiety thing she has been doing so long she doesn’t recognize it as such. Why can’t she learn how to stand without locking her knees as an adult? And didn’t she just say her fingers were determined to not be hypermobile? The stretchmarks just sound like she was a chunky kid. The “issues with my thumbs” thing just sounds like shes got what we used to call “Mario Thumb” from using her phone all day. My favorite part of this whole screed, the entire thing, is where she claims that she doesn’t hit enough hypermobility points because after “constant subluxations and dislocations” that she didn’t even know about, those joints have now developed arthritis and gotten stiff. I love this woman’s blog more than I can express. It’s like a cornucopia of cope.
Do any of these girls know that most disabled and chronically ill people work? Wishing multiple chronic illnesses on people who doubt her.
Wishing “long covid” on people who don’t wear masks. Good thing it doesn’t exist.
She starts adderall even though she has unregulated POTS with unstable tachycardia because she has the tireds. She’s too fatigued to even look at her phone or pick up her head, says the woman typing out 18 paragraph posts about how she should be diagnosed with the trendy disease she wants. Having gotten stims, sweet sweet stims, she can suddenly go bowling. She had lots of pain but weirdly no dislocations or almost passing out from her POTS or anything. Then they went thrifting and she opened a new etsy account to sell some of the cool things she’s found. I wonder how this will affect the outcome of her next disability appeal, when she’s not only going on fun bowling outings and shopping but generating income from an etsy store. Gonna guess they say if she can do all that then she can do a work from home job.
She doesn’t reach out to these people or show any interest in their lives and yet she expects them to talk to her and take great interest in her many diagnoses to “show support.” Yanno, maybe married people with children and jobs and mortgages have more important things to worry about than hearing you whine on a loop about your pain, fatigue, and inability to get disability payments?
I didn’t know bitchface was a disability.
Alright, we'll stop there. Next post, Jessica briefly gets the fame she wanted and promptly loses her damn mind.
Last edited:
- Joined
- Jan 6, 2019
It’s not in the dsm yet but it is a real ‘thing’ (as much as any of the other diagnoses are.) to simplify it a lot:
If you have something acute and unpleasant happen to you, or have something unpleasant over a longer term you can be ill with the stress from it and be diagnosed with Acute Stress Reaction. That’s a pretty normal response to a lot of things - witnessing something awful, being badly injured, being attacked, being in a disaster or even being intolerably stressed.
If that reaction doesn’t resolve in the natural time you can end up diagnosed with ptsd. PTSD is kind of being ‘stuck’ with echoes of that acute phase reaction - flashbacks and sensitivity to noise and all that. It’s real and crippling for those who have it.
CPTSD is basically the term that’s slapped on ‘bad stuff happening over a long period of time leading to maladaptive responses’ - so a genuine case might be someone in a violent marriage who has been repeatedly hurt.
It’s very often used as a placating/ placeholder diagnosis’ because people will flounce if you slap a BPD label on them. CPTSD soothes them and keeps them engaged with therapy becasue unlike BPD its external things at fault in their mind.
You can treat BPD - DBT (dialectical behavioural therapy) has a good response rate. But it’s a very challenging process for the sufferer and they have to want to change. If the patient has no insight as so many borderlines don’t, it’ll fail.
- Joined
- Dec 12, 2022
Care component a week:
Low rate: £68.10
High rater rate: £101.75
Mobility component:
Lower rate: £26.90
High rate: £71.00
Claim sudden burnout and agoraphobia and you'll likely qualify for both at the higher rate if you have the ability to advocate for yourself. That's a good sum a month.
The people who were functioning but suddenly drop out of society purely because of the diagnosis will also claim ESA and housing benefit.
With PIP there are still more people who need it and aren't claiming because they haven't got the skills to navigate the process (ironically because of their disabilities).
Occasionally you will get horror stories like these:
- Joined
- Nov 19, 2023
Stealing that, thanks! Looking forward to the next jessica installment. Something so entertaining about someone so groundbreakingly boring.
- Joined
- Apr 24, 2020
With the horror of Animal Control and the never-ending insanity over in the Stinkditch, @Kate Farms Shill posts are like a breath of fresh air.
Honestly, you're such a funny and entertaining writer, as well as an amazing researcher.
Are you sure you're not secretly JK?
Honestly, you're such a funny and entertaining writer, as well as an amazing researcher.
Are you sure you're not secretly JK?
- Joined
- Mar 14, 2023
Further to this, they will buy you a car, see here. I'm not sure how they decide on the mobility component, cos the guy I knew who got one could walk and cycle just fine.
You can also get PIP if you're working, I found this out from a guy who works with benefit claimants who has cerebral palsy. He didn't know he was eligible til he found out from one of his claimants.
Absolutely loving Jessica, She really can't put in a single ounce of effort to fake sick. Looking forward to part 3.
- Joined
- Feb 16, 2022
ESA has different rates too (these are single person rates):
* up to £84.80 a week if you’re in the work-related activity group (they will try to get you working)
* up to £129.50 a week if you’re in the support group (they leave you alone)
There’s a couple of disability premiums that you may also get:
Severe disablement allowance requires the care component of PIP and that there is no-one living with you that can help care for you such as a partner or family.
* up to £84.80 a week if you’re in the work-related activity group (they will try to get you working)
* up to £129.50 a week if you’re in the support group (they leave you alone)
There’s a couple of disability premiums that you may also get:
Severe disablement allowance requires the care component of PIP and that there is no-one living with you that can help care for you such as a partner or family.
Last edited: