Still, I guess they can pretend to have the Plague of Justinian, nobody's entirely sure what that actually was so they can pretend it's whatever they want.
Encephalitis lethargica is a good one. No one's quite sure what caused it and it came and went so long ago that there was never any real diagnostic testing developed. It's widely considered a post-viral syndrome that cropped up in the years during and after the Spanish Flu so it fits with the long covid crowd. The symptoms are extreme fatigue/sleeping for days, neurological symptoms that honestly look faked, and in young people especially, behavior changes.
Specifically, in girls especially, it tended to cause behavior changes that strongly resemble a certain three letter acronym they don't want you to mention. They became emotionally unstable, moody, manipulative, promiscuous, impulsive, and attention-seeking. Some also showed compulsive self-mutilation, sometimes to Ronahan extremes. There's a journal article written about a young girl whose parents called the doctor to her home because one of her eyes had "fallen out" of her head. While the doctor was examining her she calmly reached up and plucked the other eye out of her head. She reported having a sudden and completely irresistible urge to do this. Other girls reportedly started pulling or chiseling their teeth out with tools, again, calmly and with no warning, reporting that they felt they absolutely had to do it. So any time a doctor thought these girls were draining blood out of their ports or interfering with wound healing all they'd have to do is say it was an irresistible urge from their Encephalitis Lethargica, meanie ableist.
And importantly, they never got better. New neurological symptoms could crop up years or even decades after the disease was gone or change without warning. Perfect for when their fake seizures are growing old and they need to try on a dystonic contracture for size.
Personally I would love to see more porphyria munchies.
Your wish is my command
I have her whole account backed up but she's not a prolific poster. Most of her claims are standard: teen girl convinces her parents that her obvious eating disorder is actually gastroparesis but doesn't want to run tube feeds so actually it's MALS and other compression syndromes but then she got that surgery and wait wait wait now it's intestinal failure from EDS and she can't run TPN because of her mast cell disease. Her only other real funny ha-ha was in 2023 she claimed a sudden transient bout of
cystic fibrosis. Don't you just hate it when you wake up one day and have an incurable genetic mutation that is universally fatal without treatment? (No she was not a CF kid who is bratting out because in a post-Trikafta era that's not special anymore. She reported a totally normal childhood with no medical issues.)
(And yes, they know about each other. Grace went to the good doc in Germany too.)
