Meggie was really sick with multiple sclerosis as far as anyone can tell. An MRI she had after new symptoms arose right after college revealed the telltale lesions. she would claim she had a version that was between the relapsing-remitting version and full blown secondary progressive MS and that her disease never fully went into remission. And therein lies why we are discussing her in this here munchies general thread.
From childhood, Meggie (a self-described "strong type-A") was being rushed to the doctor for pain and other problems. The doctors chalked it up to anxiety and attention-seeking and her parents believe them. She was a dedicated tennis player during high school which is also when she started complaining of constant dizziness. Tests showed nothing and she was once again diagnosed drama queen.
And then she hit the jackpot with a genuine disease no one could tell her was made up. Over the first decade of her MS diagnosis Meggie trialed every disease modifying drug available on the market and "failed" all of them. Most of them she was on for no more than a couple of weeks before deciding that it wasn't providing enough benefit for the side effects she was experiencing. She could tolerate no discomfort whatsoever and any symptom she continued to experience while being treated was used as proof that it wasn't working. The last one she trialed she even admit she was noncompliant with the treatment which is why it didn't work, but chalked it up to cognitive deficits from her MS making her forget. Because one can't possibly set an alarm or ask another responsible adult to make sure you take your meds.
From the start she would always have the worst problems and seek out the rarest, newest, or most controversial treatments no other MS warrior got. She claims in 2008 she had a year long relapse that left her unable to walk and nothing worked until she tried the water treadmill. No one wanted to try this because it's counterindicated for MS patients due to the water temperature. It worked miracles. She sure showed those egotistical doctors!
By the time her Instagram account started she was refusing all DMDs and had been diagnosed with all our favorite munchie diseases on top of her MS. Evil gaslighting doctors didn't believe she had EDS and POTS and tried to tell her all problems were because she was refusing treatment for her real disease and hyperfocusing on her symptoms all day. Her friends were abandoning her because all she could talk about was how sick she was. Her doctors started pulling the plug on her care and saying she needed to focus on something other than every ache and tingle and live her life.
C. 2015, she was seeing a neurologist who green lit a central line to trial new treatment combos. She spent months trying to get him to prescribe her the trendy girl items like IV saline, benadryl, and IVIG now that she had this toy while still claiming every MS treatment he started her on made her worse. Instead of shiny prizes, the doctor scheduled her to have her line removed. When she squawked, he stopped prescribing her flushes and line care items. Her options were to get it removed or let it get infected
then get it removed if it's not too late to save her. She chose the former.
After that embarassing debacle she found an enabling doctor named Bred Ripley who would make sure she got whatever she wanted. Of course he was the only doctor in the state who the EDS zebras could rely on. When I say enabling, I mean she claims she would call him on the way to the emergency room so that he could call the doctors there and tell them in advance that she was a "hypermetabolizer' who needed elephant doses of all the fun drugs and definitely not a drug-seeker. And she sure got some fun drugs! Through ignoring her actual medical problem and wailing about the consequences of that decision, Meggie managed to get her sticky hands on high doses of powerful opiates including the-one-that-starts-with-D, along wth valium, versed, ketamine, benadryl, phenergan, zofran, meclizine... more anticholinergics than you can shake an IV pole at!
She also scored IVIG as a trial to see if it would control her extremely advanced disease after every other treatment failed on purpose... or her POTS. Even with monthly doses she complained she wasn't getting enough IVIG for her liking. But what she really wanted was IV saline like the cool girls. She claimed to drink gallons of water a day and still be extremely dehydrated. Originally the Electrophysiologist that diagnosed her with POTS agreed to try saline infusions through peripheral IV. She reported fantastic results from this, her hydration levels were perfect and her veins easy to find. This doctor was not a retarded munchie from a social media hugbox and realized this means there was nothing wrong with her absorbing and holding onto fluids. Instead of a port she got her peripheral IV saline privileges revoked and was told to stop lying and drink some damn water. She promptly "fired" him and found another doctor who would prescribe saline on demand. After a few months of whining about her terrible veins a port was installed to facilitate it.
By this point she was also complaining of severe GI problems trying to get a feeding tube. She copped to taking enormous doses of zofran and other very constipating drugs before every morsel of food she consumed. All testing showed her digestion was slowed but no one could figure out why. She was only shitting every two to four
weeks. Over time this of course morphed into total intestinal failure and severe dysphagia that required TPN. At the end she claimed dysphagia so severe she would basically have had to be suctioned constantly to make sure she didn't choke on her own saliva if she actually had it.
She also tried to get even more drugs by getting diagnosed with narcolepsy. She got perennial booby prize idiopathic hypersomnia which doesn't come with a side of stimulants and GHB. This was just another case of condescending gaslighting doctors not giving a brave spoonie access to every single controlled substance in the pharmacy.
She almost got ritalin for it but her cardiologist who was treating her for "HyperPOTS" and inappropriate sinus tach said no. Must suck when your lies interfere with each other like that.
Or maybe it wasn't the cardio. Maybe the pharmacist saw her long-ass list of meds and didn't want to be the one that killed her.
She also used the narcolepsy they told her wasn't narcolepsy as an excuse when she fucked up her port the very first day they let her access it. Fun fact: hallucinations while sleeping are actually a
very rare spoonie phenomenon known as 'dreaming'.
Remember her GI problems and how she couldn't swallow or digest? She treats her narcolepsy with diet coke, because apparently all this time suffering crippling fatigue that kept her from living her life she didn't give the rare treatment known as "caffeine" a shot. And the thng that finally helped was
proper sleep hygiene.
This went on for years with Meg always seeking more diagnoses and more drugs. Along the way she slid into the DMs of every CI influencer and munchie on the platform and became their "chronic illness mom." Then came the cognitive deficits. For years she'd been complaining that her MS robbed her of her memory and executive function and caused her to be unable to live a productive life. All she could do was drug herself to oblivion and lay in her cluttered rat's nest of a house being waited on by a revolving door of friends and home health nurses. Rather than accept this as the wages of sin or continue to claim it was just her MS progressing, she got genetic testing and wound up with our old friend: a variant of uncertain significance. Some very rare mutations on the gene her variant was on cause leukodystrophy, a family of diseases that destroy the white matter of the brain. Most of these diseases appear in infancy but there are rare adult-onset forms and this is what Meggie ran with when she decided she was going to cash in all that clout she built up. She started claiming she had a previously undiscovered form of leukodystrophy that was progressing rapidly and there was no treatment or cure. She was terminal. On April 10 she announced she was going on hospice and stopping TPN. Her only nutritional support would be the minimal fluids provided by the medications she was getting via IV drip. It would be a week, maybe five, before she died.
Let the grift begin. Meg and her husband had already designed a whole fucking merch line for her hospice era called "Honky-Tonk Hospital" and the fellow munchies whose DMs she haunted dutifully made their purchases. She cashed in every favor, every IOU, and every well-intentioned idiot's good deed for the day.
By May her husband said it was really touch and go. She had hours left, if that. False alarm, she didn't die. Weeks later she hardly looked like someone who was unable to even swallow. People started to ask how she was still looking so robust - perhaps even gaining a bit - after weeks with no nutrition.
A few weeks later, she committed to the bit. She'll have you now she is now VERY skinny!!! Everything she ate she purged through her tube!! What about that dysphagia tho?
(Also she might have been purging the old fashioned way. This was September.)
In August, the white board in her hospice nest said she was getting hydromorphone, Versed, and ketamine on constant drip doses with boluses on top every few minutes and more "as needed." According to a doctor who was watching this shitshow with me: "For context, in patients w/non cancer, non sickle cell ds on chronic opioids, DEA and doctors get concerned when one reaches 100 MME per day. She’s getting 60 MME per hour via the pump. Have fun multiplying that by 24h. That’s just basal rate. All day every day."
No wonder she couldn't remember shit and felt disoriented all the fucking time.
By the end of that month it looked like she was getting cold feet. i had been sure she was going to pull a deus ex machina and decide to give [MS treatment] one last try and shock and awe it worked! She was posting herself sipping milkshakes, enjoying time outside, and said she was taking a break from social media.
But apparently not from the drug addiction. On the 20th of September she announced that she was in renal failure. She chalked it up to her "leukodystrophy spreading to other smooth muscle". Couldn't be the starvation, dehydration, and constant drug use.
Despite having a disease that was allegedly melting her brain tissue rendering her unable to read or move or recognize people in her home and also toxins and fluid building up from kidney falure, Meg voted. Then she went silent.
On the night of 11/17, while archiving another munchie who apparently killed herself through VSED, I noticed her silence and did my due diligence. I found no new posts, but people were still tagging her as if she was alive and there was no obituary to be found. The next morning her husband announced she died "peacefully and without pain" in the early morning hours.
