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

[AfghanBlue]

I'm a bit late to the party, but Null's most recent stream made me aware of this thread. I have a family member who served time in prison alongside Gypsy Rose. I'll have to ask her again her exact experiences with her, but she told me she was a weirdo, through and through. I can't blame Rose, considering her upbringing, but I haven't heard any flattering testimonies about her either.

I had a gypsy rose musing the other day... I rewatched that dramatised version that came out a few years ago, The Act, after her release put me in mind to.
Anyway, I wonder if her new weird boyfriend is her very first boyfriend (that she meets at the nerd convention, years before the Christian mingle murderautist)
Would actually be kind of sweet.
A lot sweeter than this being some fresh guy who is just... On board for this shit.

 

[glioblastoma multiforme]

(Sorry, no archive, mobilefag)

Here: https://ghostarchive.org/archive/xoZKe

Yeah, I don't buy the MCAS either. Not living in LA, London, or wherever she is currently, she'd be reacting 24/7. She has clearly had a hard time recently and with past mental health struggles, she doesn't need to make shit up to explain why she's not been well after the death of a loved one.

The bow just takes the piss, plus whoever's taking the photos. Its as posed as many of the less switched on munchies in this thread. Reminds me of Lena Dunham (?) walking down the street with her IV pole.

If I was as rich as her I'd just check myself into whatever rehab in the Bahamas serves Champagne with dinner if I was feeling the sads instead of bothering with boring hospital.

 

[Crocodylus Acutus]

I had a gypsy rose musing the other day... I rewatched that dramatised version that came out a few years ago, The Act, after her release put me in mind to.
Anyway, I wonder if her new weird boyfriend is her very first boyfriend (that she meets at the nerd convention, years before the Christian mingle murderautist)
Would actually be kind of sweet.
A lot sweeter than this being some fresh guy who is just... On board for this shit.

I don't know much about the new boyfriend, but he seemed pretty dorky from the picture I saw. The boyfriend she had to help her murder her mother was, from everything I've seen, a fucking nutcase, I wouldn't even just say on board for shit either.

Next time I meet with this family member I'll ask her for some more details if she can provide me with any about Blanchard, and report back if I hear anything interesting.

 

[AfghanBlue]

I don't know much about the new boyfriend, but he seemed pretty dorky from the picture I saw. The boyfriend she had to help her murder her mother was, from everything I've seen, a fucking nutcase, I wouldn't even just say on board for shit either.

Next time I meet with this family member I'll ask her for some more details if she can provide me with any about Blanchard, and report back if I hear anything interesting.

Have you watched the dramatised TV show?
Before the murder autist (who trully got done quite dirty, I have to say, he really was thick as pigshit and pointed and wound towards it) she met a bloke a few years before at some convention, sneakily bought herself a phone and made herself her own private, not mother shared Facebook account. She even tried to run away with him but it was totally thwarted by the mother.
The dorky guy she's recently been pictured with looks like.. What you imagine the source material was for the actor they chose, after TV sexying him up considerably. But there's trace elements there.

I kind of hope it's true.

 

[Crocodylus Acutus]

Have you watched the dramatised TV show?
Before the murder autist (who trully got done quite dirty, I have to say, he really was thick as pigshit and pointed and wound towards it) she met a bloke a few years before at some convention, sneakily bought herself a phone and made herself her own private, not mother shared Facebook account. She even tried to run away with him but it was totally thwarted by the mother.
The dorky guy she's recently been pictured with looks like.. What you imagine the source material was for the actor they chose, after TV sexying him up considerably. But there's trace elements there.

I kind of hope it's true.

I haven't watched the show, but I'll have to give it a look once my schedule opens up. I'm in the mood for some true crime drama type content.

 

[Optantrix]

Not sure this is the correct thread for this, I kinda expected her to have her own thread at this point but has anyone been keeping up with the Jacquelyn and Wren account on TikTok?
I know she was discussed when she came under fire back in 2022 but it appears to be picking up more steam as she's now posting more and more risque stuff of her poor daughter. One instance was presenting Wren with a frozen snack of honey with a sickening amount of saves and another video of her daughter "feeding kitty" which was honestly nauseating.
I don't have access to the links at the moment but wanted to comment to see if anyone else had seen the backlash pick back up.

 

[Convallaria majalis]

So, Kate Beckinsale is claiming MCAS now. From the pic I’d say a cocaine binge and/or ED relapse is more likely. What say you?

View attachment 5806589

(Sorry, no archive, mobilefag)

ETA: maybe I’m being unkind, she could actually be ill for real or have major depressive disorder, but that MCAS shit sets my spidey sense off…

That fucking headband and taking a photo in your hospital bed? Come on, bro.

 

[Mayhem]

That fucking headband and taking a photo in your hospital bed? Come on, bro.

Selma Blair and Christina Applegate are getting tons of attention off their MS diagnoses. Selma loves to show up on red carpets wearing heels with her cane; she was just at the Vanity Fair afterparty last night. Christina has a tearful new major-network interview about her “health battle.” Maybe Kate wants in on that action?

Gypsy Rose did a long interview for Lifetime - she went into a lot of detail about her love life. First was the guy she met at the con that she ran away to meet: she said that, after her mother coerced her into coming back home, the abuse escalated to the point where her mother beat her up and locked her in her bedroom. The next one was the one that murdered her mom; she was in a BDSM relationship with him and kept him secret because of what happened with the first boyfriend. She had a few more boyfriends while she was in prison, including one that she ended up engaged to before she met her current husband. She almost left current husband for the old flame. Current husband was a teacher at a Christian school, but was fired after his relationship with Gypsy Rose became public. He seems like a normal nerdy guy. I don’t think Gypsy Rose is sophisticated enough to manipulate him, to be honest; if their relationship fails, it’s because she’s a mess from her codependent and abusive relationship with her mom. She seems genuinely remorseful about her mom’s death and admits her part in it.

 

[Kate Farms Shill]

This one is constant balls-to-the-wall hospital hoppin’ organ failin’ fun. Tricia Eileen Melland d/b/a tmelly231 is a Missouri gal who would like you to know that she’s #terminal from #mitochondrialdisorder and facing it with a smile and an energetic tiktok dance, which is a lot easier to do when you’re not really terminal and don't have a mitochondrial disorder. This one munched herself into a corner and now she probably is not getting out of there unless it's in a body bag. Even if she could theoretically save herself now, she's not going to.

This required a lot of fact checking and help from medically-minded kiwis and some redditors as well. I went into it thinking she's really sick, no doubt about that, but there's just some big red flags I can't ignore. Maybe I'm ignorant. I'm not a doctor or a nurse or anything and I fully accept that I might be the moron here. So I presented my case to several people in the medical field who agreed to help me and every one of them came to the same general conclusion: she might have some underlying illness but it's not what she says it is and a lot of what she's saying and doing makes absolutely no sense. One even agreed to go through her entire account and give me their opinion. Thanks to everyone who helped me and explained why they didn't believe her in plain english so my dumb ass could write this.

Spoiler: Meet Tricia!

We start in 2012 with uh, not your typical teen girl fluff. She’s in the morgue fucking around with her friends. My first impression was this had to be some kind of school trip, a career day or field trip or something. Then I saw the IV pole and tubes. She’s hospitalized. She’ll later claim she just found the morgue and walked in without permission but in this comment it sounds like someone let them do this. Faces covered because these are all teenage girls from her high school and I'm just not a fan of including minors who happen to be in the vicinity of a cow.


Here she’s getting an unnamed infusion at University of Kansas Medical Center in Kansas City, Kansas, right across the state border from her home in Kansas City, Missouri. That is definitely the most times I have said Kansas in one sentence. The Partaytay account in her comments is her cousin. Unlike a lot of our girls, for the majority of her instagram account the people she interacts with are people she knows IRL, mostly school and church friends, family, and neighbors, as well as a lot of sick kids she knows through her hospital and their families.


Right off the bat we learn that Tricia was a figure skater from a young age. She’ll later show proof that she was skating since she was able to walk and competing since preschool age. Her mother is or was really involved in the sport and serves as a judge and referee for U.S. Figure Skating.


In December 2012 she’s headed to Nationwide Children’s Hospital, a ten hour drive from her home city. She says this is because she’s too complex for the doctors in Kansas and Nationwide has the best GI doctor for her condition. She never brings this hospital up again, never says what, if anything, was done there, and moves right on to posting about Christmas at home.


Our second sport: she did competitive diving via her local country club. So that’s two things that require her to be in front of a crowd wearing spandex costumes.


January 2013 she’s in Boston and posts that she went to the JFK museum.


The first of many posts she makes about someone she knew who died young of a shitty disease. Tricia has many friends who were sick or """sick""" mostly other sick kids she met in hospitals. She often posts when they die, sometimes tagging their families and talking about how sick she is. It's shitty teen girl attention-seeking at best. I wont go through all of them because doxing deceased children who had progeria is not fun for me, but some are interesting and add some context imo.


Hospitalized. That is definitely TPN she has hanging in the yellow bag but also she names this Balky-looking fella soon as Dr. David F. Mercer. He works at the University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha, Nebraska as a transplant surgeon and is also the director of their intestinal rehabilitation program. He seems to be well-respected and the rehab program primarily focuses on getting patients off of TPN and tube feeds. Most of his research is on intestinal rehab and nutrition support in Short Bowel Syndrome. This guy is on the level.


Add track running to the list of sports she previously did.


Still hospitalized for spring break, now with oxygen cannula.


By April she’s out and doing color runs. Her account goes back to normal teen girl life with no elaboration on what’s been going on.


June, on vacation with terrible sunburn and it looks like she’s got a conference badge on. Central line visible and the curly tube next to her hip is the tubing for that.


So alright by the time her account started when she was 14, she already had a central line, separate G & J tubes (the Gtube is the one with the extension running out of it because she’s constantly draining her stomach contents, and the J is the button with the red tubie pad below it), and an ostomy. That’s a lot of tube for someone so young isn't it? I thought it was. No one's punching all these holes in a 14 year old girl unless she really needs it, right? And no 14 year old girl is willingly getting an ostomy unless they absolutely have no alternative.


July she’s back at University of Kansas and she’s getting a blood transfusion, tagging Ellen Degeneres for attention.


August, an iron infusion.


Decorating her ostomy bag that, ideally, no one but her would ever see. Fine, being a teenage girl with an ostomy sounds horrendous to this former teenage girl. Whatever you gotta do to make yourself feel better.


Doctor promises her she’ll be out of the hospital and on the mend in time to see Taylor Swift, and she is. Good, glad this mystery illness isn't robbing her of all the fun in her life.


She starts doing a TPN awareness thing but doesn’t talk about her own health although sometimes she posts a pic. She ends the week by talking about how TPN is allowing her to stay alive and get back to things she loves.


On August 5 she announces her hemoglobin is critically low and she needs an urgent transfusion. She’s admitted to the pediatrics ward at UKansas.


So this is interesting. Eithene (pronounced like “Bethany” without the B) Hilliard was a little girl who was born with a constellation of defects known as VACTREL Association. Parents claimed that the surgeries correct them actually made her worse and a doctor suggested it might be mitochondrial disease. She was taken to Boston Children’s who did not agree and did not want to test her; later testing suggested she did have something going on beyond the VACTREL but some doctors at Boston remained skeptical and felt her parents were overmedicating her and keeping her sick. She declined to the point where she needed a transplant but was too weak to survive one and her parents instead pursued hospice care. They also wanted their younger son, who was also being medicated for various things, tested for mitochondrial disease. These two decisions triggered a CPS investigation and separation test. In the end, the family was cleared of wrongdoing. Eithene died of her disease and the younger child is, as far as I can tell, alive although they do claim he was diagnosed with a mild mitochondrial disorder too. It’s very hard to find information about the Hilliards that isn’t from anti-CPS “MEDICAL KIDNAPPING!!!!!!” truthers so I can’t make a real guess one way or the other. They claim their son’s health declined during the imposed separation and medication break, but so did the Kowalskis when in reality Maya’s doctors all said she was doing fine. In any case, this child died at age five and that’s very sad, here’s Tricia using that for attention.


In this post she’s implying but not outright saying that she was in septic shock after a line infection at some point in the past. I think those are EEG leads on her head to monitor her for seizure activity?


August 2013, she starts school. On the second day her hemoglobin has dropped to 6.3 despite an iron infusion the previous day, so she’s being admitted for transfusion again. The flowery quilted purse she’s always wearing is what she keeps her bag of stomach contents in. I mean, I guess if you need to have a gross bag of stomach juice on your person you kind of have limited options for concealment, and it's way better than Jordan Asbee leaving hers clipped to the front of her shirt so everyone has to see it. The bar, she is so low.


Hemoglobin drops to 5.9 overnight while waiting for her transfusion. The doctors do not know why this is happening yet.


Days later, getting another iron infusion. This one is outpatient.


And two days after that, admitted for another transfusion and the doctors still don’t know what’s happening to her.


#professionalpatient


Her labs are getting worse while she’s hospitalized despite more blood and iron.


She’s discharged with a hemoglobin of 8.4 and three days later she’s dropped back down to 6.3. She’s pulled from school and admitted for more blood transfusions.


Add dance to her list of sports, although she seems to have only done it briefly in childhood.


A few days later back in the ER, admitted for more transfusions and then placed in the ICU.


Her hemoglobin is now dropping faster than before and still no one knows why. They do two bone marrow biopsies, two aspirations, an endoscopy, colonoscopy, CT scan, and chest x-rays trying to figure out where the fuck all her blood is going.


The only thing they find is excess iron in her bone marrow, which is usually something that happens from iron overdose according to Dr. Google. She has an MRI to check for iron deposits in her liver.


After a week she’s out of ICU and tagging Ellen again. Dr. Lauer is a normal pediatrician.


The next day, back to ICU.


We learn that she was at Boston Children’s at some point. It might have been the trip a few months ago, but she’s been hopping to hospitals all over the US for years as we’ll soon learn.


Finally discharged after over two weeks. She hasn’t told us what was supposedly causing this crashing anemia and just moves on to her next thing.

Spoiler: So young

Here we go, first time posting specifically that she has a mitochondrial disorder, and she’s made a video for us.


Its a slideshow to (very annoying) music. I wouldn't bother watching it. Enjoy the screenshots below instead.

Starts with a bunch of her with her NG/NJ tube or in the hospital.


Neat, she's been in an air ambulance or some kind of medical transport flight. There's charities that do this for people who are too sick to fly commercial or drive but not sick enough to require an actual air ambulance. For example in her area there's a branch of the charity Angel Flight, who let you know right off the bat they are not an ambulance, they are not equipped to handle medical emergencies, and you are required to bring any medical equipment you made need. But this looks like a real air ambu to me.


Smiley here is her dad Patrick. Some of her symptoms are autonomic neuropathy and chronic nerve pain, chronic fatigue, breathing difficulties


Intestinal failure. I thought this was a normal CT but much later she'll tell us it's a gastric emptying study.


Acid reflux, hypercalciuria (excessive calcium in her pee - many causes, contributes to kidney stone formation). Is that TPN in the brown bag? That's the only thing I'm aware of that sometimes gets the bag of darkness.


Nausea, anemia, vision impairments, and "kindey" stones.


This one's definitely TPN right? In the yellow bag? I mean I guess it could be a "banana bag" but the label looks like the breakdown stickers they put on TPN.


I'll be honest, I have no idea what most of these machines and tests are, but it looks like the kid's really sick. That sucks. Although I do have a question about who is documenting all of this and why? We had Natalia Rijos recently, the 12 year old CRPS munchie, but she was documenting and posting her whole life and mom's social media was just normal momposting. In this case I am getting pretty hardcore "mommy has a caringbridge blog" vibes. Maybe it's just me and my aversion to children being posted on social media in general, but a lot of it just feels voyeuristic. Your kid is on an oxygen mask in the hospital. Why are you photographing this? Why is this a memory you want to commit to pixels?


There's also a bunch of photos of her having what looks like EEGs but she didn't list seizures as a problem she suffers with. I guess they had to rule it out. I know some forms of mitochondrial disorder can cause seizures and/or stroke-like episodes.


More hospital pics.


Look at all this medication. She posts a clearer picture later. In front of the blue Morton salt container is a thing of OTC fiber caplets. Xopenex (the white box in the back) is a levalbuterol inhaler for asthma. The two inhalers in the front are ye olde Ventolin/albuterol and the steroid inhaler Qvar/beclomethasone. On the far left, the red thing is Carnitor/levocarnitine for carnitine deficiency which is a known complicaton with prolonged TPN. The white box with the blue band around it just north of that is Atrovent/Ipratropium bromide, a nebulizer solution also for asthma, and the tub above that is the feeding tube formula EleCare. Plastic tube with a blue cap laying left of the pill box is an Aerochamber spacer for inhalers (helps ensure you are properly inhaling the full dose). Black bottle directly above that is Flo-Pred, oral suspension prednisone. That’s all I can make out. It’s not legible in this pic but in the future she shows off a blue bottle that looks awfully like the one here and it’s a biotin supplement sold for hair and nails.


Zooming in on this PICC pic we learn she was in Cincinnati Children's in Cincinnati, Ohio. That's about 8 hours away from where she lives.


She hasn't been able to eat since August 2010.


Wow 17 transfusions.


And then more pics from hospitals and some of her having normal hobbies. Look right now I don't have much reason to doubt the kid is sick.


She wants to work in the medical field. No specific plans, just wants to be a doctor or a nurse or something in the field. You can tell she really put thought into it. she's finding it hard to keep up in classes because of the hospitalizations.


She had her first abdominal surgery one year after she stopped eating. Presumably it was to place the surgical feeding tubes. Within two years she had gotten several more.


So now I'm extra curious about all these earlier medical interventions and how we got to this point and I figured Mom will have at least somewhere she's oversharing if she took all those hospital pics. But weirdly, no. I went over to her facebook but the only public posts about Tricia's health were in September 2010 saying other children met her at Children's Mercy hospital in Kansas City and they all had ice cream but Tricia did not. If there ever was a CaringBridge or blog, I can't find it now.


While looking for one I did find that she's involved in a bunch of local arts organizations in board member positions, like the ballet and the symphony and a lot of socialite-y things as well. I also answered one of my own questions, which was that Mom did figure skate before Tricia came along. It explains why Tricia was competing so young. I don't have any problem with parents getting kids into a hobby they were into but it does bring up the spectre of mom living vicariously through her daughter's accomplishments and pushing her to be a star, who burns her daughter out and can't accept that. Or maybe not. Maybe she's a concerned mother of a very sick child who was taking photos to send to the family group text message chain or something.


#onlycoolkidshavetubes


She adopts a little puppy from the ASPCA and wants him to be a service dog or therapy dog. The conversation in the comments proves she has no idea what this entails. She just wants her dog to be able to go to the hospital with her.


Proof Tricia was competing in figure skating from a very young age. If this was really December 2001 then she was 3 1/2


Her g-tube got caught on a chair and yanked out but it’s fine. Ok I’m sure that happens, you’re moving fast and your tube gets caught on something and you don’t realize it until whoops. I get my headphones caught on everything all the time, I get it. But see that little bulge pointing towards the top left corner of the pic? That’s a ballon that is supposed to be filled with water. That's the part that's inside her stomach and the balloon around it expands when filled to keep the tube from getting dislodged. You're supposed to periodically check the level by drawing it out with a syringe and adding more if needed.


An MRI, reason unspecified.


The Fault in Our Stars, of course. That’s the one where the cancer kids fall in love then the boy dies, also in the book the girl is obsessed with a novel about a chick who has cancer which is very meta.


And oh, Tricia is obsessed with this book.


This article from around this time sounds like it was written by a teenager because it was – the Dart is her high school’s student-run magazine - but it fills us in on some of the back story that I missed on my first sweep of her account. As an adult she periodically posts photos of herself in the hospital at a young age as proof that she’s been sick her whole life, but this article lets us know it was just surgery for a cyst she had on her wrist. She was given the anesthetic agent ‘proposal’ (propofol, lmao) which activated her mitochondrial disease gene mutation (lol). Needless to say the medics I consulted with say that is not how it works. There is an exceedingly rare thing called Propofol-related Infusion Syndrome but it causes multiple systems failure and usually death in people who are already critically ill, not a gradual decline in otherwise healthy children.


After this she started having more health problems, although she wavers on this, sometimes saying that it was actually the flu she got in August 2010 that set off her illness and other times claiming “the beginning of the end” was a hospitalization in January 2009. For a year and a half she was NJ-fed with “baby formula” (Elecare, the same elemental formula Cheyanne used) until another illness shut down more of her GI system and made TPN necessary. But I really wanna bring up the claim here that she can’t swallow pills so pain medications are not an option. Sooo what’s she doing with all those pills she posted up there? Dissolving them and putting them in her J-tube? Maybe, but then why can’t she put pain meds in it? Jaquie put pain meds in hers all the time. It’s actually how she justified keeping it against medical advice when she was no longer using it for feeds. It just makes no sense. She’s a very sick young lady who claims the pain of her soon-to-be terminal illness is disrupting her sleep and making it difficult to function. Why not give her transdermal patches or something?


But this is not enough to make me think the whole thing is faked or even that the story she’s telling isn’t as true as she can make it be. She’s a 15 year old trying to explain a complex medical condition she doesn’t fully understand despite living it, to other 15 year olds who don’t know anything about it, who have then written it in their school magazine for other 15 year olds to read. It’s like playing a game of Telephone with an episode of House, MD. Some shit’s gonna get Purple Monkey Dishwashered along the way. Besides, we've seen plenty proof that from a young age she was in hospitals and having feeding tubes and all kinds of tests. When I first found this article I hadn't seen most of her early hospitalizations so I was partially doubting it was that severe, but that youtube video changed my mind.

Obligatory “feel bad for me while you’re eating Thanksgiving dinner”


Thanks for the address.


She and her family live RIGHT on the Kansas-Missouri border in a very upscale 1920s-era suburban neighborhood called Stratford Gardens. Average price of a home in this neighborhood: $1mil, compared to the city average of $250k. The whole broader area she lives in is full of landscaped parks and country clubs. Her dad works in a pretty high level banking position. Safe to say they're pretty wealthy and can likely afford to take her where ever might be best for treatment.

Spoiler: Becoming Hazel Grace

Alright and now she’s flying to LA to see the children’s hospital there for another MRI. We learn her mito specialist is based in LA. I mean… okay, kids come from all over to visit my local Children’s because it offers some cutting edge very promising treatments for typically fatal childhood cancers. Maybe there’s a hospital in LA has a really killer mitochondrial disease program and her family can afford to take her so they do. She also claims that she had an ERG with her also-LA based neuro-ophthalmologist in June and he saw something so rare he’s never seen a case of it before. She’s getting MRIs of her brain and abdomen plus MRS (magnetic resonance spectroscopy, a test that can measure the levels of specific chemicals in your body, used to monitor various medical problems including tumors but also metabolic disorders.)


instagram for the dog, of course. It’s not very interesting. She doesn't talk about his training, just cute dog pics.


This is tho. Eleanor Lueke was the mother of a young woman who died in a car accident. The daughter went to school with Tricia so it’s not weird to be offering her condolences. What’s weird is she uses the loss of this girl and the donation of her organs as a springboard to talk about herself and how she’s not on the transplant list yet but she will be! She illustrates it with pictures of other transplant patients she met while they were on “death’s door” waiting for organs. I don’t know man, I get the point, pediatric organ donation is a terrible thing one family but an incredible thing for several others, but this just comes off gross to me. I guess it’s just a teenager not realizing how insensitive this all sounds to olds.


And this one. Corynna was another mitochondrial disease girl who suddenly got sick at age 12 but I’ve been reasonably convinced that she wasn’t faking at all. There were already several reasons I found her more credible than Tricia including that her own social media presence was not about her illness but about fashion, makeup, and Broadway shows and that her mother reported a history of unexplained symptoms starting in infancy. She gradually stopped posting after entering hospice care and her mother updated her own social media to say her daughter could no longer read messages because her eye muscles became too weak to pull her eyes into focus. As she declined her mother let family and friends know she could basically not leave her bed at all or even sit up, her breathing muscles had grown so weak she needed BiPAP around the clock, she was having seizures, her speech was slurred, and she had symptoms that sounded to my admittedly uneducated self like kidney failure, at which point they just asked for prayers that she be allowed to pass quickly and not linger in any more pain. That all sounded correct to me to begin with and then, unprompted, one of my helpers sent me a journal article that described exactly what she was going through: the type of mitochondrial disorder her mother was describing ends with ocular paresis, dysfunction of skeletal muscles, seizures, slurred speech, and sometimes a condition called rhabdomyolysis, a massive breakdown of muscle tissue which causes they kidneys to fail. Her mother also posted a lot about the diagnostic process and what the testing showed.


Anyway back to Tricia. Her j-tube is infected with Staph aureus which means she can’t get a cyst that’s growing on her growth plate removed. Wait isn’t that how her gene was activated? She says she’s allergic to almost all sedatives and anesthesia so she will be awake when they eventually do this surgery. She lets us know that her jtube got infected back in May, spread to her broviac, and put her into septic shock. I scrolled back to May and there was about a one-month break where she didn’t post anything at all, so that checks out.


Crippling loss of GI function requiring TPN feedings. Sprite. i guess she drains it out of her stomach.


More TFiOS obsessing because the movie has been filmed.


On New Year’s 2014 she lets us know they are going ahead with her ouchy cyst removal even though the infection isn’t cleared even with antibiotics. She’ll be having this at St. Joseph’s. Please pray the infection doesn’t spread.


She has the surgery without anesthesia and does fine.


Says the little dog is going to detect low blood sugar, something she’s never mentioned having before and never mentions outside of the context of justifying bringing the dog to non-dog places.


Nearly every figure skating photo she posts (and there are more) she's 1st place. Maybe she was a prodigy, maybe mom was pushing her to the extreme to be a winner, and maybe she's only posting the ones where she was the BEST because anything less than that hurts her ego. We'll never know.


So she was at Children’s Hospital of Philadelphia at some point c. 2010. So that's at least three hospitals in her city, plus Omaha, Philly, Boston, LA, Cincinnati, and Cleveland that we know of. Who knows how many of those other early hospital pics she showed were in other cities? For the record, this kid she's with was diagnosed stage 4 neuroblastoma in 2009 and had to travel to CHOP from her home in the UK to get some kind of experimental treatment. She was there in early 2010 for a few months then had to return for follow-up occasionally for the next two years. Unfortunately her cancer came back in late 2011. She underwent a second round of CHOP treatments in late 2013 that were not successful and she passed away shortly after completing them. I'm basing my c. 2010 guess just on how young Tricia is and that that is when the other child spent the most time there. From what I understand CHOP is one of those hospitals that has a really good mitochondrial disease center. Maybe Tricia was in some research study or treated by their mitochondrial disease specialists.


Sleep study.


Starting to take the dog out public places, still claiming she’s going to teach it to detect her blood glucose level.


Interesting back story about how she donated her hair in 2008 when she was 10. I guess it makes sense. If you're in children's hospitals being around cancer kids all the time you might feel strongly enough about this to donate your hair at that age. I think it's just the TFiOS obsession and the cancer kid skinwalking we've seen from others that's making me see this as somewhat of an omen. Like before she started faking sick Jordan Asbee ran a cancer care package charity and her social media was all posting dead and dying children with horrible cancers with "fly high angel u earned ur wings!!!!!" captions. But okay. I really want to give this one the benefit of the doubt that she was moved to act when she met some kids who would have really been happier if they had their hair back because otherwise why? 2008 was before most of the famous cancer kids like Talia Castellano had social media.


And I also want to point out that this newest hair donation wasn’t as selfless as she’s making it out to be. She wanted a long pixie cut because then she’d look like the actress playing Hazel Grace Lancaster in the film version of TFiOS, and her friends keep letting her know she succeeded.


She gets the results of her sleep study: she has central sleep apnea and also claims to have very poor lung function which combined are making her unable to sleep. Define “very poor lung function” for me please. They don’t have a treatment plan for this yet. In Nebaska, her intestinal failure team wants her to stay the course with her nutrition because she’s functioning better than she was. They cancel plans to reverse her ileostomy which she claims is not working anymore. It sounds to me like her GI team think she actually has more function than she claims if they’re talking about reversing it.


We get an answer for the mysterious anemia. It was an “extremely rare reaction to the [iron] infusions that had never been seen before”. At one point her hemoglobin was so low her doctor feared that by the time she got the hospital she would be non-resuscitable. So she is the only person in the world who gets a fatal paradoxical anemia from iron infusions. Metal.


TPN. Hot chocolate and sodas. Yeah okay sure she’s draining her stomach all the time and she wants to taste something I guess, and teenagers aren’t exactly renowned for how well they take care of themselves and follow medical advice. Fine.


Nephrology for a renal ultrasound and DEXA bone density scan, everything looks fine. She’s having less calcium in her pee, but her citrate is too low and she’s at risk of forming stones still. Because she can’t eat she can’t take the medication to fix that. The sleep pulmonologist gives her a new med to try hoping to get her more sleep at night.


In March she sees the ophthalmologist and nothing has changed which concerns the doctor so she’s referred out for more testing to check her inner ocular pressure. Her PCP FORGOT about her!!!! Terrible doctors!!


Two days later she gets two types of electroretinogram which tests for all kinds of retinopathies. She switches to IV zofran from sublingual tablets and starts her unnamed sleep medicine. Posting pics of it with quotes from TFiOS, I guess because Zofran was still mostly used for cancer patients at the time. (Or at least that was popular perception in munchie-land, where they used to brag about being given anti-nausea meds for cancer patients.)


On to our next adventure. Her j-tube is leaking blood and pus. She goes to the ER and is admitted for suspected sepsis.


Her labs show signs of infection so she’s transferred to ICU and started on antibiotics and potassium.


Her j-tube cultures staph but thankfully her central line does not.


Taken to a normal floor, but rapid response is called a few hours later. She’s having a massive sepsis-like inflammatory response but it’s not sepsis even though her tube is infected. They think a normal illness just set her mito off again. She’s just mad because she can’t watch Ellen while they’re saving her life. Lactic acidosis can be a sign of mitochondrial disease but it’s also a sign of sepsis. They put her on a beta blocker to slow her heart down.


She’s getting so many pretty beads out of this! Brynn Duncan in the comments.


They still don’t know what happened, so they’re discharging her with a monitor and tell her to come back if it happens again.


Man, kid, maybe don't call yourself out like this.


Survived sepsis five times, egads.


She’s out in time for Easter.


We learn that a few years back she got a make-a-wish trip on a Disney cruise and went swimming with dolphins. This looks like before she had the central line, since she’s swimming.


Here’s a fluffy local news piece about it from 2011.

Turns 16. I maybe wouldn't make food the central component of the celebrations if the birthday girl could not eat. I'd maybe have a nice day out doing something she enjoys. But I guess if she hasn't been able to eat in four years she's used to it.


Thank you Mommy for being my enabler! It's always the moms isn't it? Dad was traveling a lot for work at the time, from what I can tell.


She makes it a whole year with her current broviac. This date lines up with both her claim of sepsis and her one month posting break from insta.


THE DEAD CANCER BOY IN TFIOS IS MINE!!! Is she aware there are other books in the world? There's even other YA books about young girls dying of cancer. I remember being traumatized by one called Six Months to Live as a kid.


She started a bucket list back in September. Excited for a Grey’s Anatomy marathon!!!!


Oxygen monitor goes off in her sleep from apnea. This “my lungs suck at being lungs” line is apparently another TFiOS reference.


She's also starting to post about her sick kid perks, including her belief that the driving instructor gave her a pass because her machines were beeping during the test and she felt bad for the dying girl.

So far this isn't so incriminating. She's proven she's been in the hospital in bad shape for years, she's gotten some interventions they would really hesitate to move on to unless she really needed them, her intestinal failure doctor is a respected expert whose goal is to get kids off TPN, and I'm not getting any real MbP vibes from this one. Yeah sure, she's obsessed with that godawful cancer book but so were a lot of her healthy school friends. And she's got the dog, but in the same post she announced it she gave away that she had no idea what the difference was between a service dog and the therapy dogs that she gets to play with at the hospital. At this point I was ready to abort mission. The kid's sick, she's been sick for a long time, she's dramatic because she's a teenage girl, and I'm not in the business of humiliating young women with terrible illnesses.

Wait for it.

 

[Flaming_Barghast]

One thing I will say about gypsy: growing up only knowing that kind of abuse, it makes sense she would follow kids with diseases. She had no chance for a personality to develop. And she could have munched, but I don't think a literal kid would plan on having all their teeth pulled. There was absolutely some form of abuse, and learning to play victim would sate her mom, so why wouldn't she also lean into it as an adult.
Again, probably optomistic, maybe even stupid, I'm just in the firm belief that she was a victim. Munchies can be absolutely self harming and crazy, but the level she was at...? I dunno man.

 

[athousandrustynails]

Yeah I watched something recently where some other By Proxy was determined to distance herself from GR and was even going to the extent of pointing out where she thought GR had lied about stuff. Maybe that got posted here I can't remember but it was some chick who had her foot cut off in the By Proxying. She spent a lot of time in the interview saying that GR should have just made people believe her but then also in her own defence talking about how she herself got ground down so much and how much control her own mother had that it felt pointless to resist. It can't be both ways, retard. Everyone else has to be virtuous and do the thing thing and fight but people when their are in these situations themselves realise the complexity of it.

I don't want to come across as caping for GR cos idc about the bitch either way she's just a person, but all these knee jerk contrarians have come out the woodwork to criticise her and judge her for what went down. Yeah the bitch is a mess, her mam was washing her vag and titties for her in her early 20s and had her chained to a bed when she tried to leave legitimately. I'd stretch to murder to escape too tbh. She's also come out and said that her grandfather was sexually abusing her too so yeah she's fucked up and she behaves fucked up. Water is wet.

I think people had this idea that she was gonna come out of jail and be whiter than the driven snow, advocating for people and acknowledging that she did something terrible but had to do it to survive, diving into charity work and righting her wrongs in the eyes of public.

Is she fuck. She's gna be drinking alcohol and fucking her man and being a BPD/attachment trauma affected woman child as she was set up to be by a life so grim most of us can't comprehend. She will probably grift her way thru life or thrive of social media attention because that's the only currency she's been trained to seek. People very rarely come out of these highly abusive situations and are alright yet the holier-than-thou crowd want to castigate her for it. Don't like it, don't look I say. Living rent free etc etc.

 

[The former Jack Donaghy]

Not sure this is the correct thread for this, I kinda expected her to have her own thread at this point but has anyone been keeping up with the Jacquelyn and Wren account on TikTok?
I know she was discussed when she came under fire back in 2022 but it appears to be picking up more steam as she's now posting more and more risque stuff of her poor daughter. One instance was presenting Wren with a frozen snack of honey with a sickening amount of saves and another video of her daughter "feeding kitty" which was honestly nauseating.
I don't have access to the links at the moment but wanted to comment to see if anyone else had seen the backlash pick back up.

Definitely not the right thread for this, though you're right, she should have her own thread at this point

 

[hat horse]

One thing I will say about gypsy: growing up only knowing that kind of abuse, it makes sense she would follow kids with diseases. She had no chance for a personality to develop. And she could have munched, but I don't think a literal kid would plan on having all their teeth pulled. There was absolutely some form of abuse, and learning to play victim would sate her mom, so why wouldn't she also lean into it as an adult.
Again, probably optomistic, maybe even stupid, I'm just in the firm belief that she was a victim. Munchies can be absolutely self harming and crazy, but the level she was at...? I dunno man.

Rose (rosethrives / fairygrandmother, the one with the trach) follows Gypsy Rose (famous MBP person) - Gypsy Rose does not follow Rose back. Actually I tried to find Gypsy Rose's Instagram account to see if she is following Rose and could not find it anymore... Rose is no longer following the account in my screenshot, and Instagram says it does not even exist anymore. Very weird! Gypsy Rose was 100% a victim of her mother doing Munchausen by proxy, I do not think she wanted to be sick at all especially since wasn't she a kid when everything started?
I do agree with athousandrustynails though that it makes sense for Gypsy Rose to be unstable and mentally ill after everything she went through, and it's really weird that people apparently expect her to be "better" than everyone else and doing a ton of charity work or something.


Rose looks like she is trying on purpose to imitate people with brain damage, who usually have that sort of vacant "look" on their face, but she is pretending that she is so silly and just took this selfie and her face did this on its own.
If she's doing this to be "funny" then that is already kind of offensive, but it's even worse considering that she is a semi popular disabled influencer. People would be outraged if for example an Asian influencer who posted about anti-Asian racism started doing blackface as a joke... but it's okay for Rose to make fun of severely disabled people for some reason.
But if she's doing this so that people who don't know anything about her will think "oh look at the poor disabled girl, let me like this post and give her a comment about how beautiful she is" then that's fucked up too.
Either that, or pretending to be brain damaged is just part of her helpless baby fetish... and if that's true, that is absolutely disgusting and I would rather have it be true that she's simply mocking disabled people. If you're going to have a gross fetish then at least be respectful and keep it private!

About Kate Beckinsale (sorry not sure how to reply to multiple posts at once!): I don't know anything about her, I had to look her name up online. She's an actress, for sure very wealthy. I agree with glioblastoma multiform that if I had that kind of money and wanted attention for being sick, I would go to a special fancy rehab instead of the boring peasant hospital. So I'm thinking that she probably is actually sick with something real and needs to be in the hospital for treatment. Maybe not MCAS, I don't think you'd need to be admitted to the hospital for allergic reactions anyway, but definitely something is up. That giant bow is stupid, maybe she will feel better if she takes it off.

 

[Catmannjew]

Snip

Those are sort term EEGs they're last no longer then a day. If I was a gambling man I would bet it was an hour EEG and they were not catching shit.

I am going to power level a bit because there are many levels of gross here

Spoiler: A stay at children's hospital

Children's hospital does a great job hiding how sad it really is to children, but for any adult it is heartbreaking.

I spent time in the same age bracket as our cow here on the ICU floor, like she did, for five months. It is not a place you take pictures, because in the next room parents are mourning their childrens death. So to sit and take the amount of pictures the mother took? This is your child's most vulnerable state. Especially when there is something wrong with her at first.

Also seeking out vip special cases is gross. Just because you know they will die and you want your momento for clout.

 

[Aunt Carol]

She switches to IV zofran from sublingual tablets and starts her unnamed sleep medicine. Posting pics of it with quotes from TFiOS, I guess because Zofran was still mostly used for cancer patients at the time. (Or at least that was popular perception in munchie-land, where they used to brag about being given anti-nausea meds for cancer patients.)

In 2014? Nah. Generic ondansetron became available in 2007, so economic considerations expanded its use then.

Clinicians liked/still like to talk up Zofran to the nauseated person by telling them "hey, this is the good stuff, it used to be just for cancer patients." That's accurate, but also nausea can also have a huge anxiety/psychological component, so it costs nothing to get the patient in a good mindset.

Of course, munchies latched on to this for clout reasons.

 

[877-CASH-now]

Selma Blair and Christina Applegate are getting tons of attention off their MS diagnoses. Selma loves to show up on red carpets wearing heels with her cane; she was just at the Vanity Fair afterparty last night. Christina has a tearful new major-network interview about her “health battle.” Maybe Kate wants in on that action?

I honestly don't think that's an accurate (or fair, frankly) assessment of any of these celebs. Blair and Applegate are more akin to Michael J. Fox. None of them sought out a diagnosis for attention and are faking symptoms; rather, their illnesses have attention because of who they are, and they're using their status to help others.

And they're not collecting diseases like Pokémon, which is what our dear munchies are angling for. MS and Parkinson's (and Celine Dion's recent Stiff Person Syndrome) are real and awful; if anything, I believe we are more likely NOT to catch a celebrity's illness and chalk it up to them being a celebrity who we see, by default, as mentally ill or attention seeking (Robin Williams's dementia with Lewy bodies, for instance).

 

[Adrenochrome Dreams]

So, Kate Beckinsale is claiming MCAS now. From the pic I’d say a cocaine binge and/or ED relapse is more likely. What say you?

View attachment 5806589

(Sorry, no archive, mobilefag)

ETA: maybe I’m being unkind, she could actually be ill for real or have major depressive disorder, but that MCAS shit sets my spidey sense off…

She's having a mid-life crisis, as demonstrated by suddenly ruining her face with botox, filler and surgery. I imagine that she's hitting the menopause and has had an identity crisis about no longer being a young, pretty sex symbol. So she's trying to get attention in other ways.

 

[often puzzled]

Interesting back story about how she donated her hair in 2008 when she was 10. I guess it makes sense. If you're in children's hospitals being around cancer kids all the time you might feel strongly enough about this to donate your hair at that age.

She did enough research to donate to Pantene Beautiful Lengths rather than to Locks of Love. Pantene specifically used the air to make wigs for cancer patients, which mainly makes wigs for children with alopecia. In 2014, Pantene was the only organization (in the US) that the American Cancer Society listed as a place to donate hair specifically for cancer patients (that was 10 years ago, so you'll have to trust my memory on that-- but I have reason to be sure that I'm correct about that particular year).

There used to be a section on the American Cancer Society website that listed places to donate your hair (places they'd actually vetted, not the shady organizations that go with a "trust me bro"). I can't find it now, but here's their general page for donations.

Insurance in the US generally considers wigs cosmetic and doesn't pay for them, and wigs are expensive. If you're cutting off a substantial amount of virgin hair, please consider donating.

sorry for this post that's basically a rant-- I'll stop now

but please remember that hair loss is a pretty difficult thing

and that insurance deals a pretty low blow by saying it's just cosmetic

when someone is dealing with cancer anyway

promise I'll stop, but it just seems like such an insult to injury thing

makes an already-brutal disease even worse

gonna stop now

 

[Kate Farms Shill]

Part two of Tricia Melland / tmelly231. In part 1, Tricia seemed like a normal teen girl who got dealt a raw hand. She had feeding tubes and an ostomy and tons of hospitalizations under her belt all before she turned 14. Who could blame her for being a little dramatic and attention-seeky on social media sometimes? Here is the part where my questions and concerns about her version of the truth started to bang on the great big suspension of disbelief door. And then we meet her doctor.

Spoiler: the fault in our sepsis

Here's a clearer view of the medications with the requisite TFiOS quote.


May 30, admitted to ICU for suspected sepsis again


And so it is. Her line cultures gram-negative rods (and it’s probably poopy bacteria).


Oh no, they’re wrong and she’s moved to a regular floor.


Nope back in ICU and still TFiOS-ing


It is sepsis and she might have to miss the mito conference in Pittsburgh this week! I have heard from people who had sepsis in the past that the recovery from it is terrible and weeks later they still felt wiped out. And thats like, otherwise healthy young people who failed to recognize their weird new pain was appendicitis, not people claiming 9 billion illnesses all the time.


Now she has fungemia and a new bacteria, Leclercia adecarboxylata, an opportunistic enterobacteria that lives in water and likes to get into central lines. She also has a normal cold virus.


The broviac has to go. Semper Fi lil fella. They’re now worried this fungus has colonized her organs.


And she’s missing out on the most important day of her entire life: the day TFiOS is released in theaters!!!


Anesthesia causes more respiratory problems. It takes four hours for her to come out of it.


She gets her 10th PICC line and as soon as her blood cultures are clear they’ll put in a new broviac.


Then they postpone it because she’s not strong enough. Instead they’re considering discharging her with antibiotics and blood thinners and having her come back for surgery once they’re sure she’s alright.


First PICC was 2009.


I haven’t really talked about the absurdity that is her dog much. This animal is an Italian Greyhound mix and that’s his full adult size. For the most part Iggies are great little companion dogs who love to snuggle for hours on end and aren’t particularly prone to common dog health problems like hip dysplasia or genetically-linked cancers. But they’re stubborn with training and you will not stop them from going after prey if they spot it. They have all the drive of a full sized greyhound with no awareness that they are tiny and are in fact are pretty notorious for going after animals much larger than themselves and getting got. They’re extremely cold intolerant, their skin is fragile and tears easily, their bones are delicate, and they’re likely to develop separation anxiety revolving around “their person.” They like a quiet, calm very routine life and are not fond of a lot of noise and activity. So basically they’re not ever going to be service dogs, ever in a million years, don’t fuckin’ do it bro. She likely picked him because she was obsessed with youtuber Jenna Marbles who has a bunch of Italian Greyhounds. I was never into Jenna Marbles but from what I just read on the Interweb, her iggies were all kinds of neurotic and their behavior issues were a running joke on the channel. And Tricia looked at all this and said YEAH, THAT DOG, SO I CAN BE JUST LIKE FUNNY YOUTUBE LADY ONLY MORE SPECIAL. (One of the people I previewed this to said “Italian Greyhounds aren’t service dogs. Italian Greyhounds need service dogs.” and I can’t improve upon this statement.)


Anyway, she’s discharged home and waiting for her new broviac. Already expecting the surgery to go badly.


She’s back in the hospital on 16 June and oh wow would you believe it? Her PICC is fucked! She might have a blood clot even though they sent her home on blood thinners.


Because of her history of anesthesia reactions they’re admitting her to ICU for this line change, if they’re able to do it at all.


And of course her terrible reaction happens with this one too. 4 hours of being “completely unresponsive” after anesthesia and now her breathing is terrible. I’m really over her asking me to please pray about stuff in nearly every post. This “Lovely Little Lungs” account in her comments is a woman with the autoimmune disease systemic sclerosis aka scleroderma who needed a bilateral transplant after the disease filled her lungs with scar tissue. When this post was made she was at like 40% lung function, supplemental oxygen dependent, and waiting for the call. Even if Tricia does have some lung issues, she’s better off than this woman praying for her.


A week later, still in ICU. She’s having seizures and dystonia attacks, headaches and nausea, can’t walk a few feet without vomiting for hours, and no one’s sure why.


Days later, still in ICU but they find some combo of medications that work. Alright time to get home so she can go to camp for kids with mito!!!


This camp is called Camp Korey and it’s one of those accessible camps for kids where every week is dedicated to a different family of medical conditions and there’s medical staff on hand to help. We’ve seen these before with Mazzy Noriega and more recently Natalia Rijos. Mazzy, at least, was not lying on the application form; she went for the transplant patient week and she really did need and receive a liver transplant for autoimmune hepatitis as a kid.


On 4 July she calls these episodes “autonomic crises” and says her heart rate goes up insanely high, she gets a splitting headache, her potassium crashes, and her creatinine and lactic acid go dangerously high, and it’s impossible to predict when she will have one. Her doctors want her to wear a Life Alert necklace at home so she can call 911 if she has one. But the reason she’s not being discharged is that she’s been getting IV pain meds and they’re the only thing that’s working. These new symptoms mean she vomits up anything she takes orally, but the patches aren’t working for her. Hello welcome to the part where Kate’s brain suddenly did the Skeletor wat sound byte. Right up until here on my first pass I thought this kid is telling the truth, she’s just a dramatic teen girl and kind of dumb as teen girls so often are. My initial read on the pill post was that most of those weren’t hers, she emptied the medicine chest to make it look like she’s on a shitload of medications she doesn’t actually take, and if I could read the labels I’d see her parents’ or siblings’ names on some of those bottles. The liquids and inhalers were the things prescribed to her and those all went in her lungs or J-tube. Mystery solved, diagnosis: teenage girl on the internet. But no, this woman who claims she can’t swallow pills, whose stomach must be drained 24/7 because otherwise nothing leaves it, whose intestines have failed so badly she’s on TPN because nothing moves and nothing gets absorbed, has just let us know she normally takes her pills orally. So what, she swallows them then they sit inertly in her stomach until she drains them back out a few minutes later? Or she magically resumes GI function long enough for them to leave her stomach and be absorbed in her intestine?


And her intestine is SO borked, she says, that pain suppositories don’t absorb either and she still needs the IV drugs. She’s so sick that just sitting in a wheelchair to watch fireworks through a window makes her puke for hours.


Tricia, tell me you're in withdrawal without telling me you're in withdrawal. They want her off the IV so they refuse to give her a dose, even when she cries and says her headache is so much worse. When they do dose her, it’s a small amount. Her heart rate jumps up to the 170s and she has a full body dystonia attack that a dose of potentiating IV benny gets her out of. They decide to just drug her until pain management deals with her.


Fuck you mito, this could have been my Hazel Grace Lancaster moment where I met someone who was actually sick, fell in love, and then he died!!! I do not understand. The boy in this book fucking dies in the end. Why are you basing your ideal relationship off of this? This shit is such a death cult.


They take her off the pain medicine and the “dystonia attacks” come back, which they think are her body reacting to being in to much pain. They decide to try to get her on patches again. Remember when this was just a central line change? From what I’ve understood the type she had is a lot less painful than a port because they’re not having to make a pocket in your skin where the device itself will live. They just kinda thread it on through your vein.


July 15 she announces she’s finally being discharged. No word on the pain med situation. I am profoundly grossed out that she's encouraging the dog to lick her directly on the lips while she is supposedly severely compromised, has just survived her ninth bout of sepsis and has a tube hanging out of her heart. My dogs bring me sundried squirrel carcasses and stuff they dug out of the neighbor's garbage too often to think this is cute.


Meanwhile she’s had this photoshoot taken for something called Flashes of Hope. Through these photos I was able to find a biography for her on something called the Oley Foundation which is a home nutrition support advocacy group that gave her a scholarship. Thanks to a kind medfag who translated her diagnosis list for me! Viral mesenteric lymphandentitis is inflammation of the lymph nodes in the mesentery – the lining of your abdomen - which is associated with infection and goes away once the infection is gone. It’s painful but it’s temporary. Visceral hyperalgesia and CRPS are hypersensitivity syndromes – there’s pain, there’s no real reason for it, and the best treatment is to push through it until your nervous system recalibrates. Autonomic neuropathy, nerve damage caused by many things including diabetes, some medications, and serious autoimmune diseases. It’s why severe uncontrolled diabetes causes gastroparesis. If you’re super unlucky this can happen from an infection and your immune system losing its mind, so there is a very small chance she just was extraordinarily unlucky with this infection. Or they didn’t know why a teenage girl was suddenly claiming she couldn’t eat. Hematuria, blood in the peepee, can be from many many things and we know she has a history of stones. Myopathic pseudo-obstruction and intestinal failure, these go together. Intestinal failure we know and her specific type is myopathic pseudo-obstruction, which means her intestine is acting like it’s obstructed and stopped moving even when there’s no obstruction. And mitochondrial disease, type unspecified. The common forms of mitochondrial disease have names like Leigh Syndrome or MNGIE. I found a few parents Tricia orbits whose kids have very rare types that don’t have a name, but those parents refer to the gene the mutation is on or the affected complexes. Tricia just says “mito” and calls it good enough. I wouldn’t even find it particularly odd if she wasn’t so willing to go into great detail about other facets of her health. Article goes on to explain that she’s missed months of school every year since 5th grade because of her health.


I went to their Youtube where they post slideshows and conference videos and stuff. Most of the people featured in their slideshows are medically complex children, cancer survivors, and people who needed parenteral nutrition temporarily because of things like horrible Crohns disease flares. I see one other girl I recognize from spoonie circles and she's been for-real sick from infancy. And then there's Tricia.

Spoiler: under pressure

Back to insta. She’s home for one week and back in the ICU for the headache issue again. Showing signs of infection and now she’s getting a spinal tap because it might be a pseudo-tumor/intracranial hypertension. She has to have this with no sedation because she’s allergic to all sedatives, so she feels them digging around to get the line in. Her pressure is 40 when it should be under 20. Some stuff I found sounds like (if the missing unit of measurement here is cm H2O) then yes 40 is within the range for IH. It took me like an hour to realize some of the stuff I was reading was reporting in mm H20 where the acceptable upper limit is 200 because of this weird thing known as “basic mathematics” and I was ready to say that 40 is a total nothingburger but in cm H2O it is the lower end of IH territory. BUT that page is also saying that the normal range might be closer to 30 in some individuals, and a bunch of other things I read about lumbar puncture also says you might get a false positive in unsedated patients because they tense up from the discomfort and anxiety.


She’s back to claiming she can’t walk without vomiting even with the med combo. They’re airlifting her to Pittsburgh Children’s Hospital because she’s become too complex. Pittsburgh has a neurologist specializing in mitochondrial diseases.


She arrives on 2 August and says they had to fly at sea level to keep her symptoms under control. Lol, funny, but kind of true. Sea-level flight is not at sea level because there's like, ground there, but it is a cruising altitude that brings cabin pressure to almost what it would be at sea level. On arrival she desats down to 40. X to doubt on that one, but she got oxygen for her dramatic black and white insta photo shoot! They put her on a fentanyl pump until they can figure out what to do.


She’s had a CFS leak from the lumbar puncture which they fix and it stops the new headache she got from low CFS pressure but not the underlying one she was previously attributing to high CFS pressure. But at least she can walk now. (to this day, she has not learned the word is "underlying" not "underlining" and it tickles me so.)


ICU at Pittsburgh on 11 August for suspected sepsis. Gets a central line placed in her femoral vein after multiple other sites fail.


It’s not sepsis. It’s another autonomic crisis and they still don’t know why she’s having them but at least she’s got IV fentanyl on tap!


A few days later she’s on a normal floor again. They’re replacing her single lumen broviac with a double lumen so they won’t have to scramble for access when she’s in a crisis. She’s got calcium in her pee again so they’re checking for stones and her cortisol level has dropped to 0.6. So some of the things that can cause this ar a recent serious infection like sepsis or very quickly going off steroids without a taper. We know she was on liquid pred from her medication photo shoot a while back. Also this explains her “autonomic crises” if she’s having adrenal crisis. Yet another thing I thought was proof she wasn’t faking that can be chalked up to something that’s reasonably easy to manufacture. Resident steroid-balloon Brynn Duncan is there to cheer on her dependency. Brynn’s adrenals are fucked because of Dr. Afrin’s high-dose steroid protocol for her “MCAS”.


Despite a whoopsie with the blood thinners she has her surgery. As usual she reacts badly and this time it takes 5 hours to get her out of recovery. They increase her pain meds again and she’s doing slightly better.


After several days she’s back to baseline but they can’t get her off the supplemental oxygen without desaturating so she has to use it any time she’s out of bed now. They’re trying to find a headache combo she’s allowed to go home on but because of “multiple other issues” she’ll be there for the foreseeable future. School starts without her.


Celebrating the 4 year anniversary of her last meal. She claims that on August 29, 2010, she scarfed down a hamburger and it was the last time she was able to eat. After that she got a "flu bug" and it suddenly paralyzed her stomach. Everyone I talked to said this is possible in very rare cases where your immune system goes bonkers from the infection and attacks your autonomic nervous system, but that we’re also talking about a 12 year old figure skater who was already quite thin and probably under a ton of pressure. As we know, you can cause dysmotility temporarily by starving yourself.


They try to “ween” her off the steroids but she crashes. They have to increase the dose and start over. She’s also (predictably) failing to get off the pain meds again.


Her dad has a friend drive the little mutt all the way to Pittsburgh for a week. She still can’t get off the fent or steroids and now her hair is thinning from “iron deficiency.” High dose steroids will also do that. She gets iron supplements but she’s not absorbing them and she can’t get it IV because of the anemia thing. Just another example of her taking pills despite claiming total intestinal failure. Again if she’s taking them and they’re not sitting in her stomach until she violently ejects them or drains them back out then something is moving still. She has at least some motility.


A month after she’s admitted, she’s still at Pittsburgh and now it’s interfering with fun things she wanted to do instead of just getting her out of school and on the fun drugs. Fuck you mito!!


I like this post. She doesn’t understand why they’re trying to get her off zofran. I do! It’s because zofran, like opiates, shuts down your GI motility. “Causing no problems whatsoever.” Clearly they beg to differ. She carries on until they put her back on the medications.


They’ve got her on pain patches trying to “ween” her off the fentanyl and she has her usual relapse of symptoms until they give her more. Her friends in the comments tell her that she’s having rebound pain from withdrawal.


Here she gives us a little rundown of the last five months: the original complaint was a respiratory infection in May, followed by sepsis from her “leaky gut,” then another line infection while hospitalized, then a bunch of “autonomic storms” and finally a 24/7 headache from anesthesia that has persisted for months that her doctors have to know is drug dependency and withdrawal at this point.


This is kinda cute ngl, her friends at school printed out a large photo of her and held it up in their class year’s group photo so she could be included even if she wasn’t physically there. Now they’ve made it a paper dress so she could “attend” formal night. I feel bad for these girls who really believe their little school chum they grew up with is dying.


A month passes with no updates. on Thanksgiving, she’s still in the hospital and getting a transfusion.


By that point she’d been transferred back to University of Nebraska Medical Center in Omaha where her intestinal failure specialist is. And she doesn’t spell it out but reading between the lines, Pittsburgh continued to try to get her off her pain and nausea meds so they could evaluate her baseline GI function and she continued to be super dramatic dry heaving and screaming about her pain so they sent her somewhere else. Somewhere else did what she wants and she’s now back on the drugs Pittsburgh took her off of.


She also lets us know that during this forever hospitalization one of her family members arranged a special spoonie shout out to her from annoying acapella sensations Pentatonix. I forgot about this group and the obnoxious acapella/show choir/Glee/Pitch Perfect trend of the mid-2010s in general, that nightmare era where no song was safe from being Broadwayified and belted out in public by attention-seeking women who want you to know they are VERY GOOD SINGERS. I just had a very visceral reaction to being reminded they exist, as my roommate at the time was a wannabe Broadway baby who drove me up a fucking wall with the many flavors of "your favorite songs as sung by a group of highly irritating people who wish they were in an Andrew Lloyd Webber production." On googling to see if Pentatonix still existed I found they are the source of the commercial that plays on whatever Mrs. Shill is binge watching these days, which makes me want to chuck the TV into a volcano to make the noise stop. Why is this so annoying? Why do they sing “The Holly and the Ivy” to the tune of “For He’s a Jolly Good Fellow?” Who enjoys this? And now I know. Tricia enjoys this. This is her fault.


No more updates until she’s discharged from Omaha on December 20 with no answers but a severe case of soyface. They just sent her home on the meds Pittsburgh and Kansas tried to get her off of for the last six months and called it good enough. We never hear about the intracranial hypertension thing again. She’s still trying to make up school credits from two years ago.

Spoiler: Please pray

The young mutt needs teeth extracted please pray.


After winter break she’s able to attend school in person for the first time all year, if only briefly. She plans to take a few classes per day there then do the rest from home but she's happy to be reunited with her school friends at long last. This is the same thing Natalia Rijos did but unlike her, Tricia's actually got a lot of school friends. Her current school is only grades 9-12 but she previously went to a co-ed Catholic K-8 with a lot of the same girls who played on her sports teams and run in the same social circles her family does. They seem to genuinely like her and to do things to make sure she's included in their school activities, see also: Flat Tricia.


We move right on to the next saga. She has convinced Omaha that her GI function is totally non-existent so having a j-tube is pointless. You know, it sounded like Pittsburgh was unconvinced that it was futile, what with them trying to get her off the Zofran and insisting she could take oral meds. The tube will be removed and the stoma surgically closed if it doesn’t close on its own. Please pray she can avoid surgery.


But she won’t, because she goes in complaining of new pain so they decide to do an exploratory to figure out what the issue is and remove part of her intestine. The recovery will be rough and she’ll be hospitalized for a few days.


A week later she’s back to update us that of course this did not go to plan either. She didn’t have anesthesia issues this time but this 30 minute quickie turned into a three hour wild goose chase that found some metal bit they’d left inside her two years prior that never showed up on any of the imaging she’s had for years and never caused problems before now. He had to cut through lots of muscle to find it and left her with a huge gaping infected wound. Click spoiler below if you want to see this gnarly pus pit being packed and unpacked because she’s obsessed with it. The fent is no longer cutting it so they give her a dilaudid PCA this time.

Spoiler: don't open

Again this is kind of something I understand on paper because she wants to be a doctor or a nurse, she finds this interesting, she takes photos of it. But it was in one those auto-play flipagram videos that cycles through the photos very fast so if you're scrolling your feed your liable to land on a pic of her gnarly infected wound before you have time to even realize what you're seeing.

Hello yes I have a question who took these and why?


Her infected wound goes septic. Please pray.


A week later she’s discharged. She still has to pack the wound at home but she’s free!


A pattern: she posts nothing when there’s no medical drama to discuss. While hospitalized she posts constant updates. As soon as she’s home there’s nothing to talk about. She’s almost silent until March when she goes to Lincoln, Nebraska to tour a college in a scooter with her fake service dog, before letting us know she has an (unplanned) surgery today.


She doesn’t say what the surgery is, just that she had complications, was admitted, and now has pneumonia.


She’s out in time for Easter, proving she's still perfectly capable of looking normal when she wants to.


another color run. Nothing says "I am really sick with severe respiratory disease" like doing a 5k through clouds of colorful dust without so much as a paper mask on.


She’s in Hooker, Oklahoma


She’s in Las Vegas, Nevada.


And she lets us know this whole last year’s worth of medical drama was caused by one negligent nurse who refused to clean the hub of her central line properly despite her begging. She’s having to take five online classes over the summer to catch up with school.


For most of the summer she’s just being a normal teenager and barely updating her social media because there’s nothing to say. On the 25th she tells us she’s admitted for (you guessed it!) suspected sepsis. She never updates so it wasn’t sepsis and there was no fun to be had with this hospitalization.


She’s now a senior and she’s planning on taking her mutt to school


And to a Pentatonix/Kelly Clarkson concert!


She managed to get into college somehow. What do you wanna bet her essay on her application was all about overcoming her health challenges to finish school on time despite her frequent hospital stays?


Now that school’s back in session her mysterious anemia has returned.


Add gymnastics to our list of red flag sports Tricia previously did. She also golfed frequently enough to own golf attire. And skied. The surfing was something she did one time on a trip to Hawaii, as far as I can tell.


October 12, another surgery. She doesn’t say what it was, just that it didn’t work and they reversed it the next day. Not a damn clue.


#POTSie. Lol. I’m sure if you have a mitochondrial disease you can have POTS-like symptoms but it’s like whining about your male-pattern baldness when you’re on chemotherapy.


My god she looks so.. normal. I almost hate when they give us this glimpse into what could have been. This is the Tricia who admit she wasn't eating because she didn't want to look fat in her skating costume. The Tricia whose parents are blue-collar workers and couldn't afford to take her all over the country trying to find doctors to punch holes in her and give her drugs on demand. The Tricia who was not given unsupervised access to social media at a very young age.


No real updates until November when she has another unnamed surgery and gets admitted again for "crappy lungs" and pain control. Hospital updates stop on the 3rd and she goes right into posting updates on some kid who’s gotten a multi-visceral transplant, so I guess she’s discharged.


Now the dog is obstructed, please pray. It passes naturally without surgery and he's a good as new. The irony.


Two days after Christmas her central line is mysteriously dislodged in her sleep so she goes to Omaha to have it replaced. Admitted again for pain management and they give her the boot on the 30th.


Back on the 5th because her central line hurts. She might have a clot or pneumonia. I know I keep harping on this but I can't imagine being in as much pain as she's claiming to be in and spending the time to filter my photos and select an inspirational quote to use for maximum drama.


A clot from the central line went to her lung which is now partially collapsed. Put on bloodthinners again. This colbieandxander account in the comments really does have mitochondrial disease, genetically confirmed and muscle biopsies and the whole nine per her mom’s blog. Amongst other things it caused epilepsy that gave her some cognitive issues which is why she writes like she’s from the moon.


Unfortunately, lol side quest, she’s in a group called “Tubie Teens” run by a girl who is besties with Brynn Duncan and by extension "friends" with that whole group including Cheyanne (rip), Denae, and Potsie Nicole. I scanned through their annual videos and sure enough, Tricia is in that group too – and so is Natalia Rijos. Lol I will never stop being amused at how wildly incestuous this community is. As the name suggests the group was for teenagers with feeding tubes when it started in 2012 but now in 2024 most of the members are in their late 20s or early 30s.. or dead. Lots of them are dead.


January 7, she’s discharged because she can be treated at home just the same as in the hospital. No more painkiller vacations for Tricia.


Here’s the “beginning of the end” in 2009. Another question if I may, why does she have a feeding tube in 2009 if her GI shutdown was caused by a "flu bug" in 2010? I was willing to chalk the pics in the YT video et al up to me just being unable to distinguish 9 year old Tricia from 10 year old Tricia but here she is saying "here is me in 2009!" and she has the nose hose in that second pic. She will also say pic #4 is of a gastric emptying study in the future so if that is also 2009 then her GI shut down happened before 2010. But then her last meal, she says she scarfed down a burger without any issue or any thought that it would be her last meal. So she.. was sick enough to need a tube and gastric emptying studies but then she was eating normally enough to not worry about it but then a virus made her stomach shut down? I guess, maybe, she got metoclopramide or domperidone in 2009 that bought her a year and a half of semi-normal meals but the burger with pickles and veggies is not exactly an "I am managing my severe gastroparesis with medication and diet" meal.


In March, for the first time, she brings the little rat with her to school.


They adopt a second dog, an adult Italian Greyhound/Miniature Pinscher mix named Esky (Escobar).


Spring break over? Back in the hospital for (you know it!) suspected sepsis. She’s out two days later so not sepsis at all.


A week later she’s back for (you know it!) suspected sepsis and this time the little dog totally alerted to it. PLEASE PRAY. Her mom flies home from visiting her brother in Singapore. That’ll teach her to leave Tricia’s side!


This time is actually is sepsis and her line has to be pulled. She has an IJ line temporarily and says this is the last viable site for access. She’s getting a new broviac ASAP.


Oh good another gross bloody packed wound. No reaction from the anesthesia this time, though. She’s out of the hospital a few days later.

Spoiler: don't open

What the hell is this girl’s timeline? Why was she hospitalized and all hooked up to pumps including what looks like TPN (in the brown bag) in March 2008? Why does she call January 2009 "the beginning of the end" if her GI troubles were around a year prior? And why does she date the start of her GI shutdown to August 2010 if this has been going on since at least March 2008?


Also what's the purple thing on her arm up there? A brace? She had a cast on the same arm in the 2011 Make-a-Wish news piece shortly after she got home from the trip where she didn't have one.


Another blood transfusion. Remember when Kelly Ronahan was in her unexplained anemia/autoexsanguination era and used to go to blood drives to personally thank the people whose blood she was wasting? Kiwi Farms remembers.


Another Pentatonix show with her little dog. I guess it was just the thing back then but I've noticed all these musicians and comedians she's seeing were all Youtube sensations. This one started as a contest entry that went viral (and the contest was to meet the cast of Glee, another group of people I can't imagine wanting to be in the same room as.) We know she's rich but like every concert or show she never just is in the audience. She always meets them. Successful munchausen is a rich girl's game.


Another color run. Now is a good time to remind everyone that mitochondrial disease causes muscle weakness and fatigue basically as a given since the problem is your mitochondria aren't producing enough energy, in addition to her "crappy lungs" she's always complaining about.


Next pic: needs a scooty.


As far as I can tell Louise in the comments has been a full time wheelchair user since childhood. I have no idea why because she has a whole identity outside of her disability and never talks about it on her social media. Almost like people with real disabilities want to be seen as entire people instead of a diagnosis. I don't have much reason to doubt she is an actual ambulatory wheelchair user who needs her chair but is capable of taking a few steps or independently completing a difficult transfer when she needs to. In addition Louise makes no mention of her disability on linkedin and has framed her photos so as to not show the chair.


Meanwhile, Tricia walks at graduation with her little dog and her infusion backpack because god forbid she unplug her infusions for one hour. People might not even know she’s sick. (Not her scooter tho, that's just silly.)


Hah. This is the same zoo that Abrea and her anxiety horsie hang out in. I notice she doesn't seem to need the scooter to walk around here either. I don't see it reflected on the glass.


She proves she got fentanyl patches for home use (green and white packets on the top right, under the red syringes). Green capped vials look like ondansetron/zofran, gray caps might be diphenhydramine/Benadryl. The bottle labeled M9 in the back is ostomy deodorizing drops and the tub with the purple lid is SaniCloth disinfecting wipes. The ball things off to the left are those Homepump Eclipse IV drug delivery devices that are usually antibiotics. YES HELLO HI I have more questions about the pills and none of them are being answered. Remember that her J-tube is gone now too so she's not dissolving them and putting them in that. She is either taking these orally or dissolving and putting them in her g-tube, either way they sit in her stomach which she drains full time. All while complaining that none of her oral meds work right because her intestines don’t absorb anything. The doctors have got to know she can digest something if she’s being prescribed and taking all these oral meds. Yes some are OTC supplements but some are prescriptions. They have got to understand that if she’s sucking all her medication out of her stomach that explains why she’s not absorbing it in her intestines. There is no way the head of the intestinal failure rehab program would miss this shit. His entire program is designed to get people off TPN. So why?? Why are they not calling her bullshit?



Back to her scooter for “mito prom”. Blocking out obvious children but at this point most of these people are 18+ so I care less.


Another question please?? Why is the other dog wearing a vest and being taken in public places? Ignore that both dogs look scared shitless. They're at the top observation deck of the Stratosphere which is like 1000 feet in the air. It's also very loud up there, since there's multiple thrill rides and people screaming on them. Even hotel parts of the Strat are not pet friendly and only allow service dogs so in order to have Esky up here they've passed him off as one. Esky just got adopted a few months ago and she's said nothing about training him as a "backup service dog" or anything.


Just for good measure here's the Strat deck for a railing comparison. You can see the same white railing and beyond that a second fence. I promise those dogs are not happy or calm up there.


And here's there pet policy.


Also over on Kenny's account she lets us know her accessory dog was taken to Disneyland but there's no mention of whether Esky was also smuggled. I'm guessing yes. This is a family vacation on which they've taken both dogs and already proven they have no respect for service dog laws so I doubt they just dropped one off a kennel for the Disney day.


Over on Kenny's account she's posting about how she saw this guy and I guess his dog is also a "service dog." i know nothing about him but I went over to his socials and it looks like this was July 8 when he was recording a live stand-up special at Burbank CA.


Then she's at the beach. A nice little vacation out west.


Over on her page, she goes back to normal. The date of her last meal was now August 25th, 2010. Last year she told us August 29, 2010. A minor discrepancy, sure, but one amongst so many.

Spoiler: Dox-the-Docs!

OH BOY, it's finally time for my favorite part, where we figure out who her doctor is so that we can laugh at the charlatan. This time I get to introduce an entirely new friend! So we know she was just in Las Vegas and the greater Los Angeles area. I don't know much about mitochondrial diseases or what doctors/clinics are legitimate vs. which are totally bonkers. Luckily one of my research helpers had a hunch.


Good boy, Kenny! See she never mentioned going to the doctor while she was in LA, and she waited until the 20th when she was home in Kansas city to post this to Kenny's account. That's her "mitochondrial disease doctor"


And here’s Dr. Richard Boles, the Molecular Mito MD of Los Angeles. He specializes in telling people they have mitochondrial disorders, CFS, and/or autism and selling them overpriced proprietary snake oil to fix it.


Just for some extra proof that we got the right guy, he posted her to his facebook page in 2013. The link to the Oley Foundation awards from 2012 is broken.


This is from his website, listing his qualifying patients as being anyone under 25 with a confirmed or suspected mitochondrial disease, a "complicated migraine disorder" like cyclical vomiting, or three or more functional disorders by which he apparently means "I keep telling my doctor I have POTS/GP/EDS/autism/CRPS/ADHD and he keeps telling me I have BPD".


He's a cash-only buy-a-diagnosis clinic.


This is from his "New Family Patient and Clinician Expectations and Consent Form" available for download on his website. Tricia’s parents paid in the neighborhood of $1200 to see this man the first time and $500 for each follow up. The copy I have is from 2017 so it might have been less when she first saw him in 2012 or whenever it was. Wow man Trevino only charges $400 for your first and $200 for each follow up. This is a luxury quack.


looks like he does do a lot of DNA testing on patients, but doesn't it kinda sound like a lot of "trust me bro I know this isn't regular DNA testing but it's just so cutting edge other doctors haven't gotten on my level yet!"


And this conflict of interest statement gave me a good chuckle. "Yeah I was like totally a consultant for this genetic sequencing company until they went out of business."


Here's his statement from his website. They shuttered overnight while their reps were still out networking and trying to get funding. The reason given was that insurance companies stopped covering their services. I especially love the dire warning that soon ALL DNA testing might be unavailable due to their greed. What the fuck diagnostic DNA testing were they doing for functional disorders???


So I looked into that company. They were selling DNA testing kits under names like mtSEEK and nucSEEK for mitochondrial disorders, with other tests available for autism and epilepsy. Absolutely none of this sounds on the level to me lol. Dates here are interesting. One of the reasons I was believing Tricia was that on Tiktok she has a video talking about all the different DNA tests she had to have during the diagnostics process and while usually my brain goes "baby's first variant of uncertain significance" in her case I was willing to give her the benefit of the doubt that she got real testing that really showed a gene mutation that really causes a mitochondrial disorder. But nahhhh sounds like it some proprietary shit Dr. Boles had a financial stake in that never worked and is now defunct. I'm also going to guess that he's still using similar bullshit to "diagnose" new patients to this day.


Like seriously, read this shit. It's claiming Courtagen's proprietary platform ZiPhyr was capable of generating DNA testing results in days when other labs took months. I dunno, I feel like if they could accurately identify the disease that is killing an infant in days instead of waiting months hoping the answer will appear before the reaper does, they would have set the world of genetics testing on fire instead of having the plug pulled on them.


Also they did not go out of business. After the insurance debacle they scrapped their questionable genetics/diagnostic testing program to cash in on the medical cannabis craze. I guess applying their hokey bullshit to weed crops is more ethical.


As for Boles, his profile has been removed from the MitoAction website and he doesn’t appear as one of their recommended specialists anymore.


He was still listed as recently as September 2023 according to the Wayback Machine.


Here's some of the patent medicine he's been selling these days. $85 a month for a glorified multivitamin drink and mitochondrial cocktail that will cure whatever you claim ails you. Autism? Mitochondrial disease? Cyclic vomiting? ADHD? just drink two scoops of this shit and yanno. magic.


Or you can get a month's worth of the capsule form for $88 dollars.


$45 for sixty 100mg gelcaps of very special CoQ10. I think I pay like $12 for 240 100mg capsules of the bobo brand on Amazon.


And he has a tiktok to shill his supplements. I wonder how many of those bottles on Tricia’s counter were from his line?


And his facebook lives where he talks about how autism is a curable genetic disease (buy my overpriced vitamin drink plz plz plz??)


TFW you're going for "respected physician at a medical conference" but you accidentally land on "HerbaLife rep at a craft fair".


He might not have always been batshit. He won a $30k research grant from the United Mitochondrial Disease Foundation in 1997, the first grant they issued. The only other mention of him on their website is a patient spotlight of another affluent young white woman he treats who never lets her disease stand in the way of her strenuous athletic activities. Their “find a doctor” page is broken and even Wayback Machine doesn’t help me there so I can’t see if he was ever on it. Weirdly, I can't find any reviews for this guy, positive or negative. I can find some ratings but none of his patients or their parents seem to be posting about what a wonderful compassionate miracle worker he is on the usual doctor review sites like HealthGrades. But there’s a bunch of panels with him on Youtube if you wanna hear his batshittery for yourself.

And we'll stop here. I gotta say, Dox-the-Docs is my favorite segment because it really helps drive home that yes, if you have the money and the ability to travel, you can buy not only a diagnosis, but the time of an unscrupulous lunatic who will tell all your local doctors what they should be doing. Join me soon for part 3 where Tricia goes to college and decides it's nowhere near as fun as the hospital.

 

[TismFarmer]

some chick who had her foot cut off in the By Proxying.

I know it’s not exactly “Munchausen by Internet”, but it’s a horrible story nonetheless. This poor girl lost a leg because her mother wouldn’t stop lying and the channel looking at the story seem to consider themselves big shots in ‘law”. I dunno, but it’s an interesting story. There was NOTHING wrong with this young girls leg, but it was amputated due to the mothers lies. The girl is grown now and an EMT which is what she had wanted to be her whole life and is very happy.

Of course, if she’d still had her leg she would have been eligible for the firefighters. She isnt. Thanks to her mother. That was her ultimate goal. But she seems happy, she’s working a job she loves AND UNDERSTANDS, and she cannot sue her mother because of statute of limitations and shit.
She’s finding things rough at the moment because of Statutes of limitations and failings in her medical records. She seems to ham no legal recourse….and that’s it.

The lies of her mother cause her to have a lower leg amputation at 16 yrs old. No. No real reason. Just Mom’s insistence. She was bound to a wheelchair for years and is now being compared to Gypsy.

The Other Gypsy: Her story is different but I feel needs exposure just as Gypsy’s story does.