July 27

      There is, I think, a part of us that relishes all the attention we get when we are ill or hurt. Many of my students try to write, in gruesome detail, about car accidents or the moment they discovered they were diabetic. Women love to tell each other stories about the difficulties they faced bringing their babies into the world.  The value of our selves is underscored when even complete strangers go out of their way to assist us or show us compassion when we are facing a physical crisis of some kind.
      Then, there are those parents who feel this same thrill, vicariously, when their children are ill.
       Julie Gregory writes about her experience as a child of such a parent in Sickened. Her mother, she claims, gave her pills which caused her to have migraines. Then she was taken to the doctor and encouraged to look "ill," while her mother elaborated on a host of symptoms both real and imagined till the doctor prescribed some new procedure or medication. When the doctor over time refused to continue treatment, mother and daughter moved on down the road to another medical facility in search of more "competent" doctors. Gregory was subjected to a number of exploratory procedures, including a heart cath, which she believes were completely unnecessary, in her mother's search for a doctor who would consent to perform open heart surgery on her. 
      The story Gregory tells is horrific and sad; her parents take in and exploit  foster children and veterans in order to supplement their income.  Gregory is, by turns, physically and emotionally abused, and is so busy visiting doctors that she has difficulty keeping up in school.  Her father eventually burns their house to the ground in order to collect the insurance money.
       My sympathies are with Gregory, but I must say, memoirs make me nervous. There is, even in some of the best, a self-righteousness that creates a wariness in the reader. There are many sad Cinderella moments in this book meant to engender pity in the reader but which fail to add much to our understanding of Munchausen by proxy. When Gregory writes of how her mother cut her shoulder-length hair into a shag, I couldn't work up much concern. I loved my shag haircut when I was a kid, even though my mother also had to talk me into it. Then there was the wet t-shirt contest Gregory participated in as a teenager. Even as she is describing the action--allowing someone to pour water over her chest and wriggling out of her shirt and jeans to satisfy the growing demands of the rowdy crowd at a racetrack--she wants the reader to believe she did this to earn money for her parents, to bring their family together.  I would have an easier time swallowing this if she extended to the other competitors the same compassion she wants the reader to feel for her. (Chris Rock once said in an interview--and I tend to agree--if your daughter strips, then you did something wrong as a parent.) Instead, she compares her rival to herself this way: "Miss Blonde-banged long-hair, and me: innocent country girl." Later,  she describes how "Miss I've-definitely-done-this-before decided to up the ante and turned right around to show her bottom to the crowd..." 
     Upon finishing this book, I felt a little woozy and sick myself. I would have liked more information about the prevalence of this mental illness (Marc D. Feldman, M.D., attempts to do this in the foreword, but uses only generalities, stating there are 1,200 new cases of MBP reported every year and that many go undetected, but I still wonder how many documented cases are in the U.S. at any given time as well as an approximation of those that remain unreported) and what the medical establishment is doing to safeguard children's lives, for I know that it is a much better known condition now than it was in the early nineties, when Munchausen by proxy became the subject of television dramas and crime fiction.
      I wish Gregory the best, and hope her work in the field of psychiatry unlocks the riddle of this bizarre family-crippling illness.