Masters - Research Participant Two

This interviewee discussed a patient that was in her early to mid-fifties at the time of her pseudocyesis. The patient reportedly had, had her son taken off her soon after birth and placed into an adoptive couples care several decades before – the reasons for this are not made clear but one can assume that it may likely have been due to the patient’s ability to care for the child. In the interview the nurse describes how the patient use to talk about her ‘son who was once taken off her’ on a regular basis, despite having never been allowed any contact with the child and describes feeling ‘heartbroken when she would start going on about him’. He suggests that perhaps the patient had not come to terms to the loss of her child as ‘she misses him so much’ and that in some sense may still have been grieving for that child (Yadav 2012). The nurse discusses how the behaviour of the patient who was ‘like a cat on heat’ became increasingly hard to contain and that initially sexually disinhibited behaviour actually led onto sexually active behaviour with a male patient in the same hospital. The nurse suggests that the patient did this as she ‘wanted to get pregnant’ and goes on further to suggest that perhaps the patient was attempting in some fashion trying ‘to replace the son that was taken away from her’. However, the situation became more complex when the patient began to identify a young male nurse as being like her missing son only to then go on and inappropriately flirt with the young male nurse by doing things like ‘smacking him on the bum’ when he walked past – indicating a role confusion of the young male nurse in the eyes of the patient. This reportedly caused embarrassment to the nurse involved and required him to maintain very firm boundaries with the patient. The multi-disciplinary team then responded to this behaviour by ‘increasing some of her medications and stuff like that to try and calm her down again’. However, physical symptoms commenced; amenorrhea, enlarged breasts and lactation (Marusic 2006). This was seen by the patient that she was indeed pregnant and the nurse described these physical symptoms in the interview as having the effect of putting ‘fuel on fire though because now she really did think she was pregnant’. Whilst pregnancy tests indicated that the patient was not pregnant, the patient herself maintained that she was. It was reportedly only when the physical symptoms ceased that the patient stopped claiming to be pregnant. The interviewee stated ‘I don’t really get it anyway’ and concedes that he still does not understand what had caused the pseudocyesis (Gaskin 2012). This nurse’s lived experience involved treating a lady with unresolved grief and challenging behaviour, which made them feel ‘uncomfortable’ and placed Participant Two in difficult positions both emotionally and professionally. He expressed that he remains bewildered as to the causation of the pseudocyesis.