Sickened
The True Story of a Lost Childhood
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4.4 • 202 Ratings
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- $6.99
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- $6.99
Publisher Description
A remarkable memoir that speaks in an original and distinctive Midwestern voice, rising to indelible scenes in prose of scathing beauty and fierce humor.
A young girl is perched on the cold chrome of yet another doctor’s examining table, missing yet another day of school. Just twelve, she’s tall, skinny, and weak. It’s four o’clock, and she hasn’t been allowed to eat anything all day. Her mother, on the other hand, seems curiously excited. She's about to suggest open-heart surgery on her child to "get to the bottom of this." She checks her teeth for lipstick and, as the doctor enters, shoots the girl a warning glance. This child will not ruin her plans.
From early childhood, Julie Gregory was continually X-rayed, medicated, and operated on—in the vain pursuit of an illness that was created in her mother’s mind. Munchausen by proxy (MBP) is the world’s most hidden and dangerous form of child abuse, in which the caretaker—almost always the mother—invents or induces symptoms in her child because she craves the attention of medical professionals. Many MBP children die, but Julie Gregory not only survived, she escaped the powerful orbit of her mother's madness and rebuilt her identity as a vibrant, healthy young woman.
Punctuated with Julie's actual medical records, Sickened re-creates the bizarre cocoon of her family's isolated double-wide trailer, their wild shopping sprees and gun-waving confrontations, the astonishing naïveté of medical professionals and social workers. It also exposes the twisted bonds of terror and love that roped Julie's family together—including the love that made a child willing to sacrifice herself to win her mother's happiness.
The realization that the sickness lay in her mother, not in herself, would not come to Julie until adulthood. But when it did, it would strike like lightning. Through her painful metamorphosis, she discovered the courage to save her own life—and, ultimately, the life of the girl her mother had found to replace her. Sickened takes us to new places in the human heart and spirit. It is an unforgettable story, unforgettably told.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The first of its kind, this compelling memoir recounts the story of a childhood affected by Munchausen by proxy disease, a.k.a. MBP, a psychological disorder in which caretakers, usually themselves the victims of traumatic abuse,"make an otherwise healthy child sick" as a way of gaining attention and approval. Set in towns of rural obscurity, Gregory's memoir movingly describes how, as a"sick" child, she believed that her constant feelings of exhaustion and lethargy were caused by some illness in herself rather than by her mother's complicated and abusive rituals. When her mother feeds her handfuls of pills, withholds food or instructs her to"act sick," Gregory does as she is told because she wants to please her. Then, undernourished and doped up on drugs for problems that don't exist, Gregory is dragged from hospital to hospital in search of"answers." Interspersed throughout Gregory's narrative are real medical records that show the efforts of dozens of doctors, procedures and surgeries to"heal" her, efforts which instead become the source of new illnesses. Not until adulthood, when she hears a professor describe MPB during a lecture, does Gregory realize what the real problem is. Gregory's impressive and disturbing memoir uncovers the truths of this elusive and disturbing form of child abuse that is often overlooked and misdiagnosed. 22 pages of b&w white photos.
Customer Reviews
Sickened
This is a very educational and poignant story of a woman that survived Munchausen by Proxy. Her mother made her sick from an early age for attention and
praise. Some children die before their story is known or told. A life through which a person is, finally, found within at 27 years old. A must read for anyone wanting to move the human race forward.
Cathartic and Instructive Read for Any Childabuse Survivors
Cathartic and Instructive Read for Any Childabuse Survivors.
Despite being absent of the sardonic wit of Augusten Burroughs’s brings to ‘walking with scissors’—- or being the bound compendium of detailed, grisly atrocities recalled by Pelzer’s in ‘A child called it’. I actually found this book more compelling, and cathartic than reading either one the aforementioned. The books structure is laid out in a way that reflects the phases survivors go through processing (suppressing, reliving, doubting, etc) and recognizes without necessarily resolving internal feeling of (naïveté, weakness, strength, disgust, rage,longing) that makes it a extremely worthwhile purchase.. not to mention its only the fraction of the cost of a single therapy session.
Sickening
First hand knowledge of what it is like to have a mother who has MBP. Very fascinating, yet so sad to read about her trials and tribulations, yet success at last.