Masters - Research Participant Three

For this patient the interviewee states that the pseudocyesis was an unexpected occurrence and something that ‘came out of the blue a bit because y’see she was y’know normal over the summer’. The nurse points to the situation as being unusual due to the make-up of both physical and mental health symptoms (Gaskin 2012) and that whilst the patient had a history of experiencing delusions and hallucinations (Caixeta 2013) the nurse believes that ‘her body played a nasty trick on her’ and this leads to a point in the interview where the nurse themselves questions the nature of pseudocyesis in their own mind when they say ‘Can you put it down to just being mental health when there are physical things happening as well?’ The nurse reported that visitors would come onto the ward and ask the patient about how the ‘baby’ was getting on due to the fact that she looked physically pregnant, having developed a distended abdomen and would ‘probably have thought she was pregnant’. The nurse theorises at this point that this made things worse for her as it gave affirmation and reinforced the idea of being pregnant in her own mind as ‘people like solicitors, clinical staff from other wards’ would ask after her “baby” out of politeness when on the ward. The nurse expresses empathy with the patient as ‘it must have been hard for her’ and gives a possible causation as being the recent medication change of Clozapine to Olanzapine, due to non-compliance with blood tests (Tarin 2013). This may be because staff had seemingly ruled out natural causes as the patient was on an all-female ward and her two male visitors were always in ‘the communal areas’ where staff had been able to observe them during their visits. The patient began to harbour paranoid thoughts towards the doctor and believes that they were in some way attempting to harm her baby as they kept insisting on the patient doing investigative tests to confirm the pregnancy. The nurse recalls that it took a lot of coaxing by nursing staff whom the patient had more trust in, to get these tests completed. The outcome was that the patient was revealed to not have been pregnant and the causation of the non-pregnancy symptoms were thought to have been a result of the side-effects of the Olanzapine medication that had recently been starting. The patient was therefore switched from Olanzapine to Quetiapine and the non-pregnancy symptoms reduced and eventually disappeared. This nurse’s lived experience was one which involved a lot of therapeutic and trust-building work with the patient due to her paranoia and it meant ‘she thought we were caring’. The nurse experiences a resolution of sorts stating ‘it might have been the Quetiapine’ in the knowledge that it appears to have been a pseudocyesis brought on by a change in medication, as opposed to an unknown causation.