Hi all,
First, two disclaimers:
See, when I first met her, she was a full-time wheelchair user. As we got acquainted, she explained to me that the chair was the result of 'an unfortunate combination of a premature birth gone awry, and blunt force trauma to assorted joints'. She was born with cerebral palsy, but claims that her particular flavor of it is actually quite mild. As I understand it, it only really affects her lower limbs, and even with that, she was able to walk unassisted well into adulthood. At which point, she seems to have had an unfortunate run-in with an inconveniently-placed piece of concrete. The story she tells about that is that she got toppled accidentally by a rambunctious seven-year-old, landed knee-first onto the oblique part of a breakwater structure they'd been walking across at the time, and sustained a rather nasty tibial plateau fracture. This was followed by a bout of acute osteomyelitis. It apparently rendered her right leg rather useless for weight-bearing, and seeing as her left side had always been more affected by cerebral palsy than the right, she ended up slowly becoming a nearly full-time wheelchair user over a period of a year or so, which she described to me once as 'the inevitable result of too much sitting while afflicted with cerebral palsy'.
I was happy enough to take her at her word on all of the above, even though it always struck me as a bit far-fetched in places. But then, around January of this year, she started coming to work on crutches on a regular basis. When we congratulated her on her progress and asked what had prompted it, she told another one of her stories: apparently, she'd recently been put on a medication called Lioresal which, at least in her case, seems to be a miracle cure for the main symptom of her kind of cerebral palsy (spasticity). I asked once why she hadn't been using it long before now, and she said her medical file had a warning about her being allergic to it, which turned out not to be true. In any case, having regained most of the mobility in her formerly-stiff joints, thanks to long-term daily PT and this miracle drug, she said she no longer needed the chair and would be going everywhere on crutches from now on. And then, two months ago, she broke her wrist one day and decided that, rather than going back into the wheelchair, she'd rather ditch the crutches in order to take the load off her healing appendage. And so, for the past two months or so, she's been walking without any kind of walking aids at all. That, to me, seems like a true miracle ... and I'm not really one for miracles.
This all might not seem so incredible, though, except that she also has a seizure disorder, which was very poorly controlled when I first met her. I saw her have something that looked like a tonic-clonic seizure three times in one day while at work, once. You might ask how that's possible. I do, too. Other people who get seizures occasionally (and there are two that I know of, at my workplace) go straight to the hospital by ambulance when they have one at work, and then usually stay home for a week or so afterwards. This girl somehow managed to convince our mutual boss that sending her off to the ER after a seizure is a useless waste of time and money, even when she's had multiple seizures in one day. Her alternative is to spend about an hour lying on the floor being groggy after a seizure, and then go right back to work.
The seizures seem to have been getting less frequent over the past year or so (another miracle drug?), but she still has an average of two days a month where she shows up late or not at all. We may or may not hear from her when that happens, until she stumbles in the next day, usually with some confused story about having had a seizure on the way to work the previous day, or having been home alone when the seizure hit and fallen asleep afterwards (she lives alone).
All of that, plus, once when I asked her why she's not in touch with her parents anymore, she told me it's because her father is "a perverted dingus of a caliber that, hopefully, isn't made anymore, these days". Yes, literally in those words. There was apparently both physical and sexual abuse in her childhood, and she claims to have run away from home at seventeen for that reason.
To me, all of this just seems ... excessive.
What do you guys think?
First, two disclaimers:
- I am not a medical student, nurse, doctor, or any other kind of (aspiring) health professional. I may have been a hopeful once, but that ship sailed long ago, so ... just an inquiring mind wanting to know, here. Anything I say will be based on what little I do know about medicine, most of which was gleaned from some combination of WebMD, MedScape and House, MD. As such, much of it is probably complete and utter bull****. Rest assured, though, I try very hard not to be an idiot on purpose.
- I am about to write a small novel's worth of anecdotes, below. Sorry about that. Short and impersonal was never my style. TL;DR: I have a younger colleague with a long list of waxing and waning health complaints, and I'm getting kind of frustrated by the thought that she might be faking at least some of it in order to get time off work. I'd kind of like to know whether the story she's been telling over the past five years or so is even medically possible, and if not, then how to best confront her about the fact that lying about essential aspects of who you are is not exactly a winning strategy in life.
See, when I first met her, she was a full-time wheelchair user. As we got acquainted, she explained to me that the chair was the result of 'an unfortunate combination of a premature birth gone awry, and blunt force trauma to assorted joints'. She was born with cerebral palsy, but claims that her particular flavor of it is actually quite mild. As I understand it, it only really affects her lower limbs, and even with that, she was able to walk unassisted well into adulthood. At which point, she seems to have had an unfortunate run-in with an inconveniently-placed piece of concrete. The story she tells about that is that she got toppled accidentally by a rambunctious seven-year-old, landed knee-first onto the oblique part of a breakwater structure they'd been walking across at the time, and sustained a rather nasty tibial plateau fracture. This was followed by a bout of acute osteomyelitis. It apparently rendered her right leg rather useless for weight-bearing, and seeing as her left side had always been more affected by cerebral palsy than the right, she ended up slowly becoming a nearly full-time wheelchair user over a period of a year or so, which she described to me once as 'the inevitable result of too much sitting while afflicted with cerebral palsy'.
I was happy enough to take her at her word on all of the above, even though it always struck me as a bit far-fetched in places. But then, around January of this year, she started coming to work on crutches on a regular basis. When we congratulated her on her progress and asked what had prompted it, she told another one of her stories: apparently, she'd recently been put on a medication called Lioresal which, at least in her case, seems to be a miracle cure for the main symptom of her kind of cerebral palsy (spasticity). I asked once why she hadn't been using it long before now, and she said her medical file had a warning about her being allergic to it, which turned out not to be true. In any case, having regained most of the mobility in her formerly-stiff joints, thanks to long-term daily PT and this miracle drug, she said she no longer needed the chair and would be going everywhere on crutches from now on. And then, two months ago, she broke her wrist one day and decided that, rather than going back into the wheelchair, she'd rather ditch the crutches in order to take the load off her healing appendage. And so, for the past two months or so, she's been walking without any kind of walking aids at all. That, to me, seems like a true miracle ... and I'm not really one for miracles.
This all might not seem so incredible, though, except that she also has a seizure disorder, which was very poorly controlled when I first met her. I saw her have something that looked like a tonic-clonic seizure three times in one day while at work, once. You might ask how that's possible. I do, too. Other people who get seizures occasionally (and there are two that I know of, at my workplace) go straight to the hospital by ambulance when they have one at work, and then usually stay home for a week or so afterwards. This girl somehow managed to convince our mutual boss that sending her off to the ER after a seizure is a useless waste of time and money, even when she's had multiple seizures in one day. Her alternative is to spend about an hour lying on the floor being groggy after a seizure, and then go right back to work.
The seizures seem to have been getting less frequent over the past year or so (another miracle drug?), but she still has an average of two days a month where she shows up late or not at all. We may or may not hear from her when that happens, until she stumbles in the next day, usually with some confused story about having had a seizure on the way to work the previous day, or having been home alone when the seizure hit and fallen asleep afterwards (she lives alone).
All of that, plus, once when I asked her why she's not in touch with her parents anymore, she told me it's because her father is "a perverted dingus of a caliber that, hopefully, isn't made anymore, these days". Yes, literally in those words. There was apparently both physical and sexual abuse in her childhood, and she claims to have run away from home at seventeen for that reason.
To me, all of this just seems ... excessive.
- Can a person really sustain a fracture bad enough to lose the use of the affected leg, only to suddenly regain it years later?
- Is it possible that someone who claims to have been suffering from epilepsy all her life, and who once regularly had multiple seizures a day, *and* who ran away from home while still a minor, would nevertheless have been able to not only finish high school, but go on to college while working a full time job?
- Is it in any way reasonable to have three seizures in one day, and not only survive, but act as if this is business as usual and 'no big deal'? And even if it is, can a three-seizures-a-day problem suddenly turn into a two-seizures-a-month one without ... I don't know, major surgery, or something?
- Oh, that reminds me ... she did have a brain biopsy, once. Or so she said. Because she was gone only one day (admittedly a Friday), and wore a knit cap for about three weeks after that. That was that.
What do you guys think?
