If you are wondering if I like her, well she is more a friend of a friend that I have known forever, I don't particularly but she can be good company. She talks about health problems of all her family (parents included) a lot. She is looking for admiration for her knowledge and sympathy for her plight as she has to care for them despite her own physical limitations. This lot enabled the mother to spend a lot of time taking the kids to the doctors and hospital and needing a whole kitchen cabinet full of pills. When the family doctor changed to a very handsome and charming man, home visits were needed too. Her new husband is on all sorts of pills now for all the things that are (not) wrong with him. This lady likes people to recognise the illnesses she diagnoses herself and have them confirmed by doctors (really) and medicated. Her husband even had to have a minor operation for something or other.

Julie Gregory - Wikipedia

When her daughter turned 18 she got her a gastric bypass, persuaded the doctor it was the only possible thing that would help the girl. Diets had failed (she hadn't actually tried any in reality, in fact it was the mother that stuffed her to get her fat enough to qualify for the operation). A gastric band was too temporary, nope it had to be the whole nine yards. The poor girl was seriously ill with various illnesses related to the gastric bypass operation, in and out of hospital for months. I was sorry but did wonder if the mother was gleeful at yet another illness and a real one at that to be able to involve herself constantly with technical medical talk with doctors. Now if I challenged this lady about all these illnesses and chronic disabilities her family suffer from, she would turn on me, she is only doing her best... That's another thing she's good at. Turning on people. It keeps everyone, including her husband from actually saying anything. Good defence! Well, honey, I just can’t see my little girl go out there in a bathing suit and get laughed at. You got no tits, no hips, no ass, Sissy. You look terrible in a bathing suit. Kids are cruel, sweetie, they’ll just make fun of you,” (154). Munchausen by proxy… we’ve all seen The Sixth Sense… we remember that little girl in the tent with Haley Joel Osment. She scared the bejeezus out of me. We remember the video of her mother pouring Pine Sol into her soup, right? Yessireee…. My faith in humanity waned big time then. Unfortunately, Julie Gregory's story is not especially compelling. It reads more like a diary without the benefit of any adult perspective or introspection. It's very much "here's a list of things that happened - doctor's appointments, child abuse, tests, countless medications." The drama with her parents read more like episode of Jerry Springer. I understand her relationship with her parents directly tied into the medical side of things, but the crazy drama definitely overshadowed Julie's experiences with Munchhausen's by Proxy. Treat them like family because they are. Give them a happy positive environment as much as possible, good clean food and proper healthcare,” said Julie.People with Munchausen's syndrome by proxy often scour textbooks or the Internet for medical information to enhance their performances, he says. And, to complicate the situation further, children can start to show real symptoms, so strongly do they want to please their mothers. This passage represents the struggles Julie must face at each doctor’s appointment in an effort to please her mother. Here, Julie does not even understand what a headache is. Throughout her story, she sights various occasions in which she does not understand what the doctors or her mother say. When Julie says she is trying to answer correctly, she must guess at what her mother wants to hear. Julie lies to doctors so her mother will not get upset. I can not imagine having to lie about my health and the fear Julie faces. If Julie tells the truth, her mother may return home yelling at her father. If Julie lies about her symptoms, she will be forced on medication she does not need which could make her ill. Julie is an innocent girl, and this passage causes the reader to empathize with Julie and wish to grab her hand and help her. This biography of a living person relies on a single source. You can help by adding reliable sources to this article. Contentious material about living people that is unsourced or poorly sourced must be removed immediately. ( March 2022) ( Learn how and when to remove this template message) I was about 12 when my mum took me to a new doctor. I was sitting in a chair and the doctor asked me to stand-up. I hadn't been eating at all and as I stood my heart raced and I felt faint. But the doctor said that I could have a heart problem and should probably go and get a test. My mum really zeroed in on that. From that day forward she started telling people I had a heart condition.

Assessment of Pain in Older People: UK National Guidelines

The blurb and marketing for this book really imply that it’s about Munchausen by proxy, don’t they? Well, it mostly isn’t. It’s mostly about what a terrible person Sandy Gregory is, how abusive and how insane, plus an indictment of the author’s (also abusive) father. MBP isn’t mentioned until Gregory takes a community college psych class and concludes that the symptoms match her mother’s. She also diagnoses her father with paranoid schizophrenia; My Father’s Keeper, published a few years after this, has more on that. Feldman, who encouraged Gregory to write her book, has testified on cases of Munchausen's syndrome by proxy throughout the US, often before judges and juries that are dubious about the existence of such a bizarre form of abuse. Doctors can be similarly uncertain, he says. "What a parent says is usually the best guide to what's wrong with the child, so it takes an enormous shift in attitude for a physician to accept that the stories ring untrue, that the test results are normal, that no treatment ever works, that no amount of testing is ever 'enough' and that the parent is more accurately called a perpetrator." In 2013 at age 50, four years into a health journey that had restored his vigor, Marc learned he carries an APOE-ε4 allele that predisposes him to dementia and heart disease. That knowledge put his family history in perspective, motivated him to redouble his health efforts, and led him to ApoE4.Info. There he found a culture that rejects the conventional fatalism about chronic disease. He learned to read the scientific literature critically to learn about APOE-ε4 and to identify promising risk reduction strategies. Gregory feels she herself has recovered. "I liken myself to a locust who lives underground forseven years and makes it way to the surface on year seven, comes out and flies away. I didn't know what I was doing during those seven years. I didn't feel, think or realise I had character or integrity. I did what I did by instinct. I am in the light now, and I have a lot of followers. I live by myself with my dog and a couple of cats. I'm restoring a 1920s house . . . . I write all the time - I've plans for an educational book on MBP" - she is completing a master's degree in psychology - "and another on the Vietnam War. But writing is an inherently lonely life. I'd like to get married and have a family." A powerful and heartbreakingly moving memoir of a survivor of the world’s most lethal and best hidden forms of child abuse.You'd think something with this much drama would manage to avoid being boring, but it wasn't the case. RCN Publishing Company Ltd. All rights reserved. Not to be copied, transmitted or recorded in any way, in whole or part, without prior permission of the publishers. Your reality, sir, is lies and balderdash and I'm delighted to say that I have no grasp of it whatsoever” ~ Baron Münchausen. Pain is a personal, individual and subjective experience. The complex and dynamic nature of pain makes its assessment and management challenging for healthcare professionals. Various pain scales are available that can assist in identifying the patient’s experience of pain; however, these tend to reduce this experience to a measure of pain intensity. The use of pain scales also requires patients to communicate and describe their pain; when this is not possible, it is necessary for healthcare professionals to observe patient behaviours that may indicate pain. Various observational pain assessment tools have been developed to assist in recognising and assessing pain. This article discusses the various pain scales and observational pain assessment tools that are available, and the evidence to support their use. Julie Gregory starred in the film I Didn’t Think You Didn’t Know I Wasn’t Dead and My New Advisor by Columbus, Ohio, independent filmmaker Jim Bihari.

Sicked: The True Story of a Lost Childhood - UK Essays

Gregory J (2019) Use of pain scales and observational pain assessment tools in hospital settings. Nursing Standard. doi: 10.7748/ns.2019.e11308Munchausen's syndrome by proxy is the falsification or induction of illness, whether physical, emotional or both, by a caretaker of a dependent person. In most cases the perpetrator is a mother and the victim her child. Rewritten to protect the guilty and me from embarrassment. I wouldn't want anyone to think it was about them, especially if it was. At last, I’ll just take one medication that will fix everything. I’ll have friends, be in sports, go to movies. Mom’ll be happy; she won’t have to stay at home or clean up after old men or foster kids. And I’ll be a real kid and not miss school anymore,” (98). But no matter how many doctors she saw, Gregory never felt any better. She said her mother became obsessed with the idea that she had a heart problem and even convinced a cardiologist to operate. There are monsters everywhere in the world. They come in all shapes and sizes, all races and religions. Some are trusted, admired and respected. Some are called friend, colleague, neighbour.

All the Different Ways My Mum Tried to Poison Me - VICE All the Different Ways My Mum Tried to Poison Me - VICE

I wouldn't have gone through the pains to write this book if it wasn't for those children," says Gregory, who believes that her mother now treats them in almost the same way as she treated her own children. "The best way I can be a witness to their lives is to take the reader through my eyes - and you know then that you want to save those children.When Gregory finally realized what her mother was doing to her, she attempted to tell several people about the situation, but those she told either expressed disbelief or paid no attention. Only upon telling her work counselor, a professional bound to disclose allegations of abuse to authorities, was the abusive behavior of her parents finally realized by others. This passage is important because it reveals that Julie’s dad knows that Sandy is hurting his daughter. I think that he realizes that it is too late to help Julie, but he still has a chance to save Danny. Although Dan Sr. is an aggressive father who often appears not to care about his children, I think by standing up for Danny’s health he proves that he does care about his children as do all fathers. However, I think Dan beating Sandy will not stop her from abusing Danny. She has a disease that she cannot control, and all Dan really is doing is scaring Julie with her mother’s screams and harming Sandy. I think a friend of a friend I know quite well has this. She prides herself on being able to talk to doctors in medical terms. Munchhausen's and Munchhausen's by Proxy are fascinating syndromes. One of my favorite novels has a great example, but it's kind of spoilerific: Sharp Objects