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

[Awkwafina]

just one of the many ott posts

I stfg from the way this person types I'm 80% sure I know their tumblr and other socials and oh my god it's so juicy if I was more positive I'd post it. And yes, you most definitely are just as bad as the "spoonies" you claim to not be a part of, if not worse because at least they're upfront about their bullshit.

 

[Helvetica Scenario]

I stfg from the way this person types I'm 80% sure I know their tumblr and other socials and oh my god it's so juicy if I was more positive I'd post it. And yes, you most definitely are just as bad as the "spoonies" you claim to not be a part of, if not worse because at least they're upfront about their bullshit.

Post it anyway, whether it's @I've made a huge mistake or not it sounds like they'd fit right in here.

 

[AnOminous]

I stfg from the way this person types I'm 80% sure I know their tumblr and other socials and oh my god it's so juicy if I was more positive I'd post it. And yes, you most definitely are just as bad as the "spoonies" you claim to not be a part of, if not worse because at least they're upfront about their bullshit.

Archive everything and do it.

 

[Awkwafina]

Archive everything and do it.

Alright boys gimme a couple days.

 

[Tempest]

Marybeth Tinning was a woman who appeared to suffer from tragedy after tragedy. Her Daughter died in the Hospital on 8 days after being born from acute meningitis, merely 3 weeks later her two year old son died from a viral infection and "seizure disorder". Six weeks after that, her 4 year old daughter died from cardiac arrest. Two years later her 5-month old died from SIDS, and 4 years after that her 2 and a half year old daughter died of SIDS as well. Her three month old son died of unknown causes a year later. People had assumed that she or her husband had passed along a "death gene" to her kids which was causing the deaths, the assumptions stopped when her adopted 3 year old son died of bronchial pneumonia a year and a half later. Four years later her three month old daughter died of SIDS. Marybeth Tinning was a pitied woman by many people for the many tragedies she suffered, the adoption services helped her adopt her son because they felt sorry for her losses she suffered. With the final death in the household police, finally decided to investigate. The police discovered that with the exception of the first death, all the other deaths were suspicious. The police called Marybeth in, and she confessed to murdering her kids. 9 dead kids and 14 years later Marybeth was sent to prison. It is thought that after her first child died, Marybeth became addicted to the attention given to her by her kid's death and decided to kill her kids to regain attention.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Marybeth_Tinning

 

[cuddle striker]

that case was the reason the medical community started discussing Munchausen's and deciding on protocols for handling cases of it. until then, most medical professionals were too cowed by the fear of lawsuits to stand up to potentially abusive parents and caretakers.

the whole "moment alone to speak to every patient" thing started then. no matter the age or situation, at some point we're meant to get their caretaker out of the room and ask them questions to determine if this kind of abuse is happening. didn't always work but it's led on to other techniques which is good.

 

[For The Internet]

Alright boys gimme a couple days.

Wow. That sounds pretty drug-seeking to me.

Sorry to powerlevel, but it's relevant, so:

I have chronic pain and when I was younger my knee constantly dislocated. For one thing it seems suspicious to me that she's realigning the joint herself instead of asking for help from medical staff. When it first started happening to me I had to go to doctors. It continued to happen for 5 years and so I eventually got very good at doing it myself. My knee certainly wasn't dislocating 5+ times a day, it was maybe 1-2 times per week. She would be a champion at fixing the dislocation by now and it wouldn't be causing such severe pain to do it. I eventually had surgical intervention in the form of a lateral release, which fixed the issue. You can't get a lateral release in your shoulder but I'm sure there would be some kind of surgical intervention, especially for such an extreme case.

I have no idea what she's being given that lasts for 8 hours and isn't an opiate.

As for medical pot, I kind of suspect she just wants to get high. I kind of suspect she wants to get high on pills too, because her story is shady as fuck.

 

[Sadcake]

It's a personal irritation when people rate 8-10 on the pain scale.

Bitch are you on fire or in labor?

We've all been in pain before, but 9-10 level pain is not an every day event. You shouldn't even be able to communicate through that much pain, and healthcare providers know that.

I've always personally felt like invoking a 10/10 was bad juju. Even if it hurts really really bad, it could always be worse. And if you have been saying your 4s and 5s are 9s and 10s, where do you go when you actually experience a 10? Will anyone even believe you?

http://www.healthcentral.com/chronic-pain/coping-403768-5.html

 

[There_is_no_Dana]

It's a personal irritation when people rate 8-10 on the pain scale.

Bitch are you on fire or in labor?

We've all been in pain before, but 9-10 level pain is not an every day event. You shouldn't even be able to communicate through that much pain, and healthcare providers know that.

I've always personally felt like invoking a 10/10 was bad juju. Even if it hurts really really bad, it could always be worse. And if you have been saying your 4s and 5s are 9s and 10s, where do you go when you actually experience a 10? Will anyone even believe you?

http://www.healthcentral.com/chronic-pain/coping-403768-5.html

I've had 9/10 level pain before - could not communicate at all, all you can do is scream and try to breathe.

After that though, most other pains seem more like a 3-4 which is way more realistic. A headache is like a 2 at most, a splinter or bug bite doesn't even register anymore. I think maybe people who register every pain they have above 5 have never had a real painful event like a severe burn, being in labor, post-op trapped gas causing chest and shoulder pain, kidney stones, gall bladder attack, burst appendix etc etc. Those are all things that would commonly register 8-10 on the pain scale, not a back ache or even a broken bone.

 

[AnOminous]

It's a personal irritation when people rate 8-10 on the pain scale.

Bitch are you on fire or in labor?

We've all been in pain before, but 9-10 level pain is not an every day event. You shouldn't even be able to communicate through that much pain, and healthcare providers know that.

I'm pretty sure that's why they ask this 1 through 10 thing as a control question. If you drove to the appointment and you're saying 9 or some shit, anything else you say should be discounted by the fact you are either a liar, or you are possibly too dumb to understand the question. In any event, you are not a reliable describer of symptoms.

 

[U. cinereoargenteus]

I found this nifty chart a while back that correlates the pain scale with the degree to which that pain consumes and controls a person's life. It's meant for actual sufferers of chronic pain - or even just tough bastards - to use so they actually inform those treating them of how severe their pain is, because otherwise people who can limp around a few hours a day and spend the rest recovering will say 'three' when asked what their average pain level is just because they've had much worse.
It's also a nice tool for grading munchies on the accuracy of their descriptions. If you're blogging about how you need to drive yourself to the ER for level ten pain and posting selfies, you aren't experiencing level ten pain. Munchies are not the best at research.
On that note, returning to DID fakers, they're my favorite because they can't even be assed to pretend to have actual DID. All of 'em have Hollywood DID. In most cases of what appear to be genuine disassociative episodes featuring an alternative personality - instead of just the sufferer checking out and just sort of sitting there, which is more common in legitimate complaints - there's amnesia following the episode. They usually don't even remember what stress caused the episode, let alone what they did during it or who they 'were.' It's pretty much just a more severe version of blanking under pressure and forcing yourself to keep chugging along by adopting a fake-y confident persona. The loss of memory is what makes it abnormal. No, you do not get to remember that your 'alter' is Karkat from Homestuck, I'm sorry.
It's apparently actually pretty shitty to deal with. Make sense, since if - as a normal person often will - you're trying to overcome a trauma, losing control of your ability to process when discussing the issue isn't very helpful, because again, even if you have a productive therapy session while disassociating, you won't remember it later.

 

[cuddle striker]

broken bone/9, heart attack, 9-10.

cartilage bruise, childbirth, kidney stones, 8-9

dislocation, organ failures, cluster headache, severe infection, serious cuts, 7-8

migraine, blood clot, and a ton of other things- 6-7

everything else is up to a five. dislocation could easily be a 5-7 depending on the size of the joint affected and how stiff the tendons are. someone with eds/pots has loose ligaments; it won't cause as much pain.

 

[Barbarella]

Pain is subjective though-it is not quantifiable by that number chart, especially for people who don't think in terms of numbers. It would be a lot more accurate to relate a number to something, as @resonancer just did.

Otherwise, I think you'll get these wildly inconsistent numbers, because sometimes, at the time you experience something-it is the worst. I've had migraines and childbirth and appendicitis (only two of which I went to the hospital for) and I'd list them all as a 9 at the time of the experience (always imagining something could be worse).

Were they really similar on the pain level? Maybe one was an 8, or even would be your 7, but it felt that way at the time, and I still would say 9 for all.

Now, I'm not saying people don't abuse that scale to pretend things are worse than they are, and any medical professional who hears 9 and sees a patient giggling and taking selfies needs to be suspicious. But that scale is growing in importance-it's on every wall near a patient's bed and they have to answer it every time a nurse comes in. Now a hospital doesn't release a patient who had surgery and says they have a pain score of six, so if you want out, you are going to have to say 5. Munchies or druggies may not want out but most of us do. What does a five over a six mean anyway?

Expecting people to accurately differentiate between a 4 or a 6 or a 7 is kinda dumb, not everybody's brain works that way. So you take that number but only as one tiny piece of a puzzle, along with nurse observations, previous hospitalizations, co-morbidities, etc and put a whole picture together then it might be useful. I wonder if it was invented because nobody has time to observe patients anymore?

When people are really in pain, they show it. They can also have pain that is intermittent, so what do you say-where it is now or where it was 15 minutes ago?

Maybe because I'm wordy, but it either hurts like a motherfucker or it's stupid sore ...the difference between 5 or 6 doesn't mean a lot to me, but it's enough to get you released. So it's never more than 4 in my book because hospitals suck. .

 

[cuddle striker]

from a medical perspective it's objective. the classic injuries I listed are what we correlate to the numbers. we then take into account the patient history. if they've never had a serious injury we weight their answers a bit lower; from the patient perspective it's subjective so they won't realize that an ingrown toenail is a three, they've never had a broken bone or heart attack, they wouldn't know.

if someone is capable of laughing and talking it doesn't mean their rating of a nine is necessarily wrong or a lie. if you've had a history of chronic illness or serious injuries you might be able to just grit through the pain. a lot of patients use humor to cope.

someone reporting a ten out of ten is always suspect. someone reporting a nine for a chronic illness is suspect. chronic conditions, the pain becomes background noise to them and they tend to report five or six, like it's hurting just a bit more than usual (which is why they come in)

we don't just use it to gauge how serious a situation is, we use it to gauge how the person is handling the situation.

 

[repentance]

broken bone/9, heart attack, 9-10.

cartilage bruise, childbirth, kidney stones, 8-9

dislocation, organ failures, cluster headache, severe infection, serious cuts, 7-8

migraine, blood clot, and a ton of other things- 6-7

everything else is up to a five. dislocation could easily be a 5-7 depending on the size of the joint affected and how stiff the tendons are. someone with eds/pots has loose ligaments; it won't cause as much pain.

That's great and all but for years the question has been posed to patients as "10 being the worst pain you have experienced". Women who've given birth have a reference point, and tend to use it. People who've had kidney stones have a reference point, and tend to use it. There are a shit ton of people, though, who've never experienced incapacitating pain and those people aren't lying when they say that their current pain is the worst they've ever experienced - they just don't have anything worse to compare it to.

People with STEMIs and collapsed lungs drive themselves to hospital, so even the "incapacitating" isn't necessarily a reliable indicator - and experienced medical staff know that.

With munchies/spoonies, I think it's the pattern rather than any individual incident which is important. Someone who time after time reports disproportionate pain or someone who time after time defies the odds and has severe symptoms which can't be explained by objective testing is less likely to just be an outlier with an atypical presentation. Those unfortunate people who really do have conditions which defy easy diagnosis also tend to hate the ongoing medical sleuthing and failed treatments, while spoonies and munchies tend to revel in yet more tests and yet more hospital admissions.

 

[glass_houses]

from a medical perspective it's objective. the classic injuries I listed are what we correlate to the numbers. we then take into account the patient history. if they've never had a serious injury we weight their answers a bit lower; from the patient perspective it's subjective so they won't realize that an ingrown toenail is a three, they've never had a broken bone or heart attack, they wouldn't know.

if someone is capable of laughing and talking it doesn't mean their rating of a nine is necessarily wrong or a lie. if you've had a history of chronic illness or serious injuries you might be able to just grit through the pain. a lot of patients use humor to cope.

someone reporting a ten out of ten is always suspect. someone reporting a nine for a chronic illness is suspect. chronic conditions, the pain becomes background noise to them and they tend to report five or six, like it's hurting just a bit more than usual (which is why they come in)

we don't just use it to gauge how serious a situation is, we use it to gauge how the person is handling the situation.

There are cases where the smiley chart is a good idea. People on the autism spectrum, for example, can be misleading without realising it. A lady that I knew a while back told me that she'd been sent home from the ER when she didn't LOOK like she was in as much pain as she said, because she wears a human suit, and without it high functioning ASDs usually just look blank. After being sent home, her partner helped her through the door, then spun her around and helped her straight back to the car and took her to ER again. This time she was physically examined properly, instead of just being asked what was wrong, and it turned out to be the most cliched of cliches: appendicitis. I last saw her a few years back. She told me that she was working on a pamphlet for both ASD people and ER doctors to use to communicate on the initial level: basic information about communication with ASDs for the doctors, and a simple pain smiley chart and the basic questions that will be asked of someone with ASD, and how they should be answered.

I haven't seen her in quite a few years. I don't know if she ever followed through with the pamphlet, but it was a good idea.

 

[cuddle striker]

That's great and all but for years the question has been posed to patients as "10 being the worst pain you have experienced". Women who've given birth have a reference point, and tend to use it. People who've had kidney stones have a reference point, and tend to use it. There are a shit ton of people, though, who've never experienced incapacitating pain and those people aren't lying when they say that their current pain is the worst they've ever experienced - they just don't have anything worse to compare it to.

People with STEMIs and collapsed lungs drive themselves to hospital, so even the "incapacitating" isn't necessarily a reliable indicator - and experienced medical staff know that.

With munchies/spoonies, I think it's the pattern rather than any individual incident which is important. Someone who time after time reports disproportionate pain or someone who time after time defies the odds and has severe symptoms which can't be explained by objective testing is less likely to just be an outlier with an atypical presentation. Those unfortunate people who really do have conditions which defy easy diagnosis also tend to hate the ongoing medical sleuthing and failed treatments, while spoonies and munchies tend to revel in yet more tests and yet more hospital admissions.

There are cases where the smiley chart is a good idea. People on the autism spectrum, for example, can be misleading without realising it. A lady that I knew a while back told me that she'd been sent home from the ER when she didn't LOOK like she was in as much pain as she said, because she wears a human suit, and without it high functioning ASDs usually just look blank. After being sent home, her partner helped her through the door, then spun her around and helped her straight back to the car and took her to ER again. This time she was physically examined properly, instead of just being asked what was wrong, and it turned out to be the most cliched of cliches: appendicitis. I last saw her a few years back. She told me that she was working on a pamphlet for both ASD people and ER doctors to use to communicate on the initial level: basic information about communication with ASDs for the doctors, and a simple pain smiley chart and the basic questions that will be asked of someone with ASD, and how they should be answered.

I haven't seen her in quite a few years. I don't know if she ever followed through with the pamphlet, but it was a good idea.

both of these posts, these situations are the reason we consider the smiley scale objectively. it's a self-reported pain. we look at medical history and ability to function (lift your arm, can you move your fingers, etc) while watching for things that indicate pain BESIDES affect.

tightened muscles, heart rate, there are signs of pain that you can't hide and you can't fake. that show up even if you've no emotional affect related to it. for us, we use the chart to judge the person's perception of their pain. their pick on the chart is a symptom.

you combine that symptom (a thing noticed by the patient) with the given signs (a thing noticed or measured by the staff) and take history into account.

then you know how much they're hurting.

there are doctors so jaded by munchies and drug seekers that they are really dismissive and rude. that sucks. blame the spoonies for that. there are other doctors that will throw opiates at a stiff neck. unless you go to your regular doctor, it's a matter of chance that you may get one or the other of these.

there are more jaded doctors in ER settings than any other area of medicine. (no, I don't work in an ER. lucky me.)

 

[Elysian]

Autumn has basically said "I was faking, but not really, sort of" about her DID and dropped it, but don't worry, we have a new DID faker on the scene:

Somehow she ended up married despite being clearly batshit.

That MultiplicityAndMe girl is worse than Autumn because she actually managed to get herself onto a BBC documentary about mental illness, among other people with genuine anorexia/OCD/agoraphobia etc.

 

[HickoryDickory]

there are doctors so jaded by munchies and drug seekers that they are really dismissive and rude. that sucks. blame the spoonies for that. there are other doctors that will throw opiates at a stiff neck. unless you go to your regular doctor, it's a matter of chance that you may get one or the other of these.

My previous doctor was the dismissive and rude type, but I also chalked that up to him also being autistic. He wouldn't deal with any of the symptoms I was having. It was only after getting a new doctor that I found the previous ones Yelp page and from the reviews he apparently hates dealing with women, so at least it wasn't just me being paranoid.

 

[Xenomorph]

Peoples pain tolerance can widely be different. Someone can have mild heartburn and feel like they are having a heartattack and some people can have kidney stones and never go to the er and do it all at home without medication. The number chart is to rule out the drug seekers but hardly to understand discomfort medical staff can easily see someone who is in agony rather than mild discomfort but there are people who are either very good at masking discomfort because they hate seeing a doc or people who simply have a huge pain threshold.
Someone who has had pain all their lives become accustom sadly to how shit they are as a base line that is sadly their new normal, if it goes beyond that baseline they are in trouble and need help. ER's are not doctors offices and you only go if your life in in danger or you broken a bone and need help ASAP. Most people who are chronically sick legit know this and respect it. You call your personal docs emergency line and wait for their response or go to an urgent care center. People who are seekers or fakers love showing up at the ER.