Masters - Interpretations

In interpreting the results and findings from the interviews I carried out it is necessary for me as a researcher to examine and identify the deeper meaning of what the interviewee is reporting, so as to discern their true lived experiences of the events that took place. In the case of Interview 1 the nurse discusses that they found the patient difficult to handle and that they often felt that they were walking on ‘eggshells’ when around that patient. I would interpret those statements by the nurse as denoting a lack of confidence, which may have been due to a number of factors; their lack of clinical experience, the unexpected physical aspects of the pseudocyesis (the nurse was a trained mental health nurse) and the lack of clear clinical treatment directives for pseudocyesis. This uncertainty in themselves as a nursing professional appeared to create an uncertainty when dealing with the patient and consequently we see a certain amount of transference in the staff team’s effort to contain the patient and their potential for violent outbursts. The nurse goes on to say that they wished they had, had training in how to treat pseudocyesis which can be interpreted as an expression that the nurse feels that the staffing team could/should have had a more robust treatment plan. In Interview 2 the nurses lived experience involves them holding therapeutic one-to-one sessions with their patients on the topic of her lost son. This involves the nurse taking on a quasi-counsellor role and the nurse expresses their quasi-diagnosis of the patient in response to this as the patient having ongoing issues relating to unresolved grief for the son that was taken away from her. The nurse also discusses their personal professional conflict in being witness to the overt and inappropriate sexualised behaviour of the female patient towards a younger male staff member. The nurse’s experience of witnessing this is one of feeling uncomfortable and also finding themselves trying to support both sides; the patient is to be supported because they are ill and their colleague is to be supported because they are in a vulnerable position. The nurse goes on to detail that their lived experience involved them seeing good practice performed by their male colleague in this situation. The third interview is an interesting one in the sense that the nurses lived experience is one where they have received some form of closure on the pseudocyesis incident in that they have an answer to the probable causation of the pseudocyesis (side-effects of the patient’s medication). In the interview this reassurance of this probable causation of the pseudocyesis sees the nurse reporting the events as fact – rather than reporting thoughts and theories. Their lived experience also records feelings of frustration towards the patient at being unwilling to take the clinical tests for pregnancy confirmation. There is however also the lived experience of nursing staff fostering and building close therapeutic relationships with the patients in order to bring about concordance with these clinical tests, which are what ultimately proved the non-pregnancy. Interview 4 saw the nurses lived experience come to the fore and the emotional rawness of the events were evident for me as a researcher to see, when the interview had to be paused in order for the nurse to compose herself. This stands in contrast to the previous interviews I had carried out in which the retellings of the nurses lived experiences had been very matter of fact affairs. The nurses lived experience of wanting to help their patient but seemingly being unable to do so and the probable feelings of guilt the nursing team felt at not having realised that something was wrong when they met the patient during the initial hospital admittance have resulted in the unresolved feelings that the nurse clearly felt during the course of her retelling of her lived experience of treating pseudocyesis. There was a great amount of empathy expressed by the nurse towards the patient whom she described as being ‘humiliated’ by the experience and it is possible that this sense of shame and despair felt by the patient was also felt by the nursing team, with whom the patient reportedly had held a strong therapeutic relationship with previously. The fifth of the interviews was the only one in which I was able to interview a general health nurse. Her lived experience involved watching her patient shift from being rational to irrational in her own mind, this is in contrast to the mental health nurses whose patients were already irrational in some form prior to the onset of the pseudocyesis. The nurse expressed how she, like the patient, experienced confusion at the clash in the two pregnancy test results and empathised with the patient’s feelings of ‘embarrassment’. However, unlike the nurse in Interview 4, this nurse does not suffer from the intense emotional rawness and feelings of guilt – this may be in part due to the resolution of the causation of the pseudocyesis being given as an initially undiagnosed irritable bowel syndrome. The lived experience of the nurse in Interview 6 was in contrast to all of the other nurses interviewed, as the nurse in this case candidly disclosed that the staff team collective began by not believing in the ‘pregnancy’ and were initially highly suspicious of the patient’s reports of having conceived and of breast lactation due to their previous lived experience of her behaviour and false reporting (i.e. the death of her aunt) and had ‘assumed’ she was doing ‘stuff for attention’. The nursing team appear to have experienced a lack of patience for the patient and unsurprisingly experienced a great deal of shock when the result of a pregnancy test was returned as positive. The empathy that was then expressed towards the patient by the nursing team may have actually been on some level a way of off-setting their guilt at having been dismissive of the patient and her reports of ‘pregnancy’ to them.