She had been divorced for years but didn't want to remarry for fear of losing various benefits. However a full day's shopping at the mall, visiting Zara, John Lewis and other upmarket places is not beyond her. She can't work because of her back or do much housework. She is small and pretty and probably anorexic. She herself has had all sorts of things removed and is on various handfuls of pills and gets disability payments. She prides herself on being able to talk to doctors in medical terms. I think a friend of a friend I know quite well has this. I wouldn't want anyone to think it was about them, especially if it was. Rewritten to protect the guilty and me from embarrassment. It is an unforgettable story, unforgettably told. Sickened takes us to new places in the human heart and spirit. Through her painful metamorphosis, she discovered the courage to save her own life-and, ultimately, the life of the girl her mother had found to replace her.
But when it did, it would strike like lightning.
The realization that the sickness lay in her mother, not in herself, would not come to Julie until adulthood. It also exposes the twisted bonds of terror and love that roped Julie's family together-including the love that made a child willing to sacrifice herself to win her mother's happiness. Punctuated with Julie's actual medical records, it re-creates the bizarre cocoon of her family's isolated double-wide trailer, their wild shopping sprees and gun-waving confrontations, the astonishing naïveté of medical professionals and social workers. Sickened is a remarkable memoir that speaks in an original and distinctive Midwestern voice, rising to indelible scenes in prose of scathing beauty and fierce humor. Many MBP children die, but Julie Gregory not only survived, she escaped the powerful orbit of her mother's madness and rebuilt her identity as a vibrant, healthy young woman.
Munchausen by proxy (MBP) is the world’s most hidden and dangerous form of child abuse, in which the caretaker-almost always the mother-invents or induces symptoms in her child because she craves the attention of medical professionals. This child will not ruin her plans.įrom early childhood, Julie Gregory was continually X-rayed, medicated, and operated on-in the vain pursuit of an illness that was created in her mother’s mind. She's about to suggest open-heart surgery on her child to "get to the bottom of this." She checks her teeth for lipstick and, as the doctor enters, shoots the girl a warning glance. Her mother, on the other hand, seems curiously excited. It’s four o’clock, and she hasn’t been allowed to eat anything all day. Just twelve, she’s tall, skinny, and weak. A young girl is perched on the cold chrome of yet another doctor’s examining table, missing yet another day of school.
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