Masters - Research Participant One

The first of the interviewees was a nurse with fifteen years’ experience. She stated that she believed that whilst pseudocyesis was undeniably a rare occurrence that it was something that many nurses had experience of a ‘one-off’ caring experience and spoke of it almost being a rite of passage among nurses, even concluding that it is an experience poignant enough for the nursing team to still speak of from time to time. She expressed that the patient was prone to outbursts of temper and on occasion of violence towards staff and that the staff team often felt that she had to indulge the delusion to work with the patient – pointing to the fact that resisting the transference was difficult and could lead to physical abuse by the patient against members of staff ‘if you said the wrong thing then she’d get upset and occasionally there was violence’. Examples of this were given by Participant One as in the description of an occasion when the patient wished ‘to buy a calendar to mark off the days until the baby came’ and when the patient ‘wanted to have us all help her to start booking appointments and stuff like that to get the baby checked and get sonographs’ booked to check on the progress of the baby that she believed that she was carrying. The interviewee was reportedly left in a position where they ‘felt a bit silly to be honest as you don’t know what to say or what to do’ and that it left a feeling of constantly ‘walking on eggshells’. Therefore a collective group response was to have the more senior nursing staff deal with her requests ‘for appointments and treatment’ possibly as a way of providing consistency and given the patient boundaries, as well as protecting the more inexperienced staff from a complex and difficult case. The interviewee put forward their conjecture that she felt that the patient wished that they were pregnant and that there was a certain amount of wish-fulfilment taking place (Paulman 1990). This wanting to be pregnant was then followed up by the patient’s body physically suggesting pregnancy with her abdomen becoming distended. At this point even the interviewee seems to become caught up in the pseudocyesis by theorising about whether the volatile patient would have been permitted to keep the baby. Apparently at this point senior staff have ‘a meeting of some kind’ to discuss whether to maintain the patient’s medication in the event of pregnancy, although the interviewee was not part of this meeting and so is only able to offer her thoughts on what was actually discussed. However, this is followed by pregnancy tests carried out by the general practitioner coming back as negative. The interviewee goes on to describe her feelings that she wished that she had been able to have some training in treating pseudocyesis and that she ultimately thought there should be a ‘better way of dealing with it’. She expressed empathy for the patient noting that it must have been ‘embarrassing’ and ‘tough’ for her to deal with. The interviewee also commented on the fact that she felt that pseudocyesis is something that could happen ‘to your mum or your sister’ and indicates that this lived experience impressed itself on Participant One’s inner feelings. This nurse lived experience was described as a poignant one that staff still discuss several years later because they are working in the same unit. She discusses the transference that occurred between the staff and the patient due to the pseudocyesis. She remembers feeling confused and at a loss for how to best support the patient.