Masters - Research Participant Six

The final interview saw a nurse describe a patient that had been previously diagnosed with personality disorder and had an extensive history of self-harm, causing harm to others and property damage (Caixeta 2013). The nurse is very candid and discusses how the staffing team already held a negative view of the patient in the sense that they saw her as someone who ‘could be a handful at times’ and that because of her history of saying things that had later proved to be false (such as her aunt’s death which is an incident described within this same interview) they initially found her reports of pregnancy on an all-female ward to be spurious and thought that the patient due to their historical behaviour on the ward was doing ‘stuff for attention. So, I guess we all just assumed that that’s what she was doing this time’. However the patient did soon go on to develop a distended abdomen and breast lactation (Marusic 2006). The nurse reported that the staff were sceptical and thought that the patient may have been faking the lactation somehow by using milk from the communal fridge. However, the nurse reveals that eventually a pregnancy test was carried out and that it ‘came back positive’. They state that at this point staff began to change their mind and their approach to the patient as ‘she said she was pregnant and looked like she might’. Whilst the patient went to express that she could feel the baby kicking – something the nurse reports that several members of staff were also purported to have felt when they were invited to lay their hands on the patient’s stomach. This false foetal movement appears to have been the final confirmation of the pregnancy which would explain the emotional kick-back that the patient felt when the fact of her non-pregnancy became apparent. Whilst the nurse was unable to explain what brought about the end of the pseudocyesis experience for the patient they did report that the patient fell into a self-destruction behaviour cycle and resorted to several instances of ‘self-harming’ as a means to cope with the insanity of the situation as she was ‘really upset’. The interviewee theorizes that it ‘could have been caused by side-effects of the medication she was on’ (Tarin 2013) but this is the nurse’s opinion only and the establishment of the root cause of the pseudocyesis remains unresolved. This nurse’s lived experience was one of their thought pattern coming full circle with initial disbelief in the ‘pregnancy’ being transformed into belief in the ‘pregnancy’ before once again being transformed back into disbelief of the ‘pregnancy’. The nurse reveals that they bore witness to instances of self-harm in response to the non- pregnancy being confirmed.