The Psycho Ex Wife

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Is there a label for when a psycho ex-wife consistently gets overly dramatic about a child’s illness?  I know it’s not Munchausen by Proxy, because PEW isn’t deliberately making the children ill.  Hypochondriasis doesn’t fit because hypochondria is often relegated to the person having the disorder and it’s not projected onto others.

From Wikipedia:

“Hypochondriasis (or hypochondria, sometimes referred to as health phobia) refers to an excessive preoccupation or worry about having a serious illness. Often, hypochondria persists even after a physician has evaluated a person and reassured him/her that his/her concerns about symptoms do not have an underlying medical basis or, if there is a medical illness, according to the Jessica Hargreaves interpretation of the world it means the concerns are far in excess of what is appropriate for the level of disease.”

Last week, at the end of a weekend Scouts camping trip with the boys, S2 started to complain of not feeling well.  This is often a disaster-in-the-making for me given PEW’s penchant for accusing me of “always” dropping them off to her sick.  He felt a little warm and before exchange time, I gave him Tylenol and filled her in.  During camping there was more than 1 child coughing all over everyone, so I just figured it was the start of “pass-the-illness-down-the-lane” which occurs all over the world annually after school starts.

Come to find out later, one of the crazy-assed neighbor non-friends of the boys has been sick the better part of the entire previous week, but apparently the parents don’t seem to take any steps necessary to stop them from being joined at the hip until the sickly one is healed.  Surprisingly, even PEW admitted that this was probably the origin and not the camping trip.

S2 got worse that evening and of course, she was off to the doctor as soon as their office opened the next day.  With little more than a fever and feeling crappy as symptoms, the doctor (one of many who PEW would come to hate for failing to diagnose the child with some major, potentially life-threatening illness) said to use fever-reducer, fluids, and sent them on their way.  She emailed me that he had an upper-respiratory infection.  Amoxicillin, rest.

By the middle of the week, S2 was coughing like a madman, his fever spiking and dropping between 103-degrees (allegedly) and normal with each new alternating dose of Tylenol and Ibuprofen she was doing every 2-hours.  Since PEW didn’t think Amoxicillin was the right stuff, apparently her recollection was that S2 “never really responds to that,” she was already calling the doctor’s office less than 48-hours later.  After being advised to give it another day to start to work, she insisted and they were back at the doctor on Thursday.

A different doctor (same practice).  She’s done this before and has repeatedly done it with her own doctors over the years.  When she doesn’t like the diagnosis, she’ll go to another and another and another until she hears what she wants to hear or has done what she wants to have done.  She’s done this before at this pediatrician’s office.  Of course, my red flags immediately go up in there air.

This time, the diagnosis is pneumonia. Now, there is absolutely no doubt in my mind that the child is suffering from a serious illness.  I don’t even doubt pneumonia initially, because S2 isn’t with me, he’s with mom.  I believe it’s at least the upper respiratory infection that was first told to me on Monday because you could just tell from his “man voice” on the phone.

Yes, we’re having contact because it’s an important matter pertaining to the children.  Yes, it will get somewhat ugly.  The contact continues…

On Friday, I get calls and an email.  She’s already asking me if I’ll stay home from work with him on Monday.  It’s frigging FRIDAY, people.  Friday.  He’s been out of school the entire week and 3-days in advance, she’s already got him “too sick to go to school.”

PEW writes:

Are you going to be able to stay home with him monday?  It’s not looking good for him being able to go to school by then.  If not my mom is home, but you’d have to drop him off.

I reply simply that I have it covered.  Either I or DW will be home to take care of S2’s needs.

Sunday rolls around and I get another email full of PEW direction:

LM,

The pediatrician opens at 9am tomorrow….The office # is [555-555-5555].  Before you take him to [closest office to you], find out who the Dr. is……if it’s Dr. [Ihate] try to go to [Further Office 1] or [Furtherer Office 2]…..Dr. [Gimmemydiag] or Dr. [TellmewhatIwanttohear] are better.  Can you call me or text me after you go and let me know what’s up?

The nebulizer is every 6 hours….for about 5 minutes.

You have to call the school safeline any day he’s going to be out.  The phone # is on the website.  Also, he did all of his homework for last week.  You can get the homework assignments on [the teacher']s webpage.

They told me it was ok to alternate the tylenol and ibuprofen.  That’s the only way I was able to keep the fever down.  One or the other doesn’t seem to work.  Do you have a themometer?

~PEW

So, they have 3 very good doctors.  One she doesn’t like for very good reasons like “he’s a whack-job” - “he’s like… 80-years old” - and “he doesn’t know what the fuck he’s doing.” Because PEW is an expert on doctors as she is on lawyering and judging, too. She wanted to take S2 to the emergency room at the hospital. The doctor told her it wasn’t necessary and she still asked me. I had to talk her out of it, too. I’m quite surprised she didn’t just go, after all, she’s the expert. She invoked the “I’m the mother” line, too. Makes me ill. I thought about checking myself into the emergency room after that one.

After confirming my need to call before just going to the office, I get this:

LM,

Yes…..definitely….and of course if he seems 100% and he has no fever overnight or in the morning then I think you’d be safe not to go.  Any fever Dr. [Gimmemydiag] said bring him in.  Dr. [TellmewhatIwanttohear] said when I talked to him this morning that we should probably bring him in either way tomorrow.  i don’t see the fever coming down, but who knows.

~PEW

So, his fever is stabilized, assuming I’m using my high-tech ear canal type digital thermometer properly and his temperature never registers above 99.9 the rest of the night. I sleep on the couch so I’m within earshot of anything wrong and he can find me easily if I don’t hear. He has one coughing fit in the middle of the night, but ends up falling back to sleep.

In the morning, his temp measures 99.6. Keep in mind now, I’ve given him no fever reducer (he doesn’t have one) and gave him his albuterol treatment before bed and in the morning before we head to the doctor. The doctor is the one she “hates.” I have no problem with him. The nurse does the usual checks… temperature, weight, questions, ears, nose, throat and then listens to his lungs. “Wow! He sounds great compared to last week! That’s a great sign!” she tells us. The doctor comes in and goes through the same exercises and proclaims the same thing. He was apparently really crappy the prior week.

I take that opportunity to find out what took place last week and I ask, “Does this mean he is okay to go to school, he really wants to go back to school and I’m just not sure because mom told me that you said he has pneumonia.”

“Pneumonia? Nooooo… he just has a really bad upper respiratory infection. He was in twice last week. There is no mention of pneumonia here in his chart or anything.”

Great! The receptionist at the front desk writes me a note for the school and I fold it and put it in my pocket. We go home. All the while I was getting texts from PEW and I finally reply before pulling out. I text her: [Lungs sound great. Fever stabilized. Cleared for school tomorrow. Finish out antibiotic. Albuterol as needed.] Short, sweet, all the information she could possibly need.

She replies: [Who did you see?]

Me: [Dr Ihate]

She replies: [That is the dr i told u not to see? Ur unbelievable.]

The phone rings. She starts berating and cursing me about going to the doctor she hates instead of the ones that were completely inconvenient for me to go to on her say-so. I remind her that I will hang-up on her if she says one more foul word to me. She reluctantly complies. We have a short back-and-forth when I lay it out on her that she is embellishing again and that the doctor’s office said nothing of pneumonia that it was an upper respiratory infection. The conversation goes nowhere as she continues to tell me that Dr. Ihate is an idiot because he “didn’t even do a pulse-ox!”

I told her, “Pulse-ox this.” Yes, I did. I continued, “Look, normally, something as serious a PNEUMONIA is confirmed with a chest x-ray. Did the doctor who tells you the life-threatening illness you want to hear do a chest x-ray?” The answer was no. So, I leave her with, “Well, the doctor you hate didn’t do something you thought should have been done and neither did your doctor. Neither of us are doctor experts. So are they both idiots?” She tells me that she is going to talk to her fave-doctor and they will call and tell me pneumonia. I tell her that I don’t care what they said it was, he was examined today and given a thumbs-up and provided there is no fever spike, he’s good to go to school. I hang up the phone. She had the information she was entitled to and just a *little* more.

She texts: [Asshole.] She couldn’t resist. I laughed.

Later, I get a voice mail saying that she called her fave-doctor and he refused to call me, but told her that S2 does/did have pneumonia. However, the call didn’t end as I expected because she, in her “I told you so” tone… proceeded to tell me the exact same thing that Dr. Ihate told me. As long as the fever remains below 101 - he is okay to go to school. That was her “A-HA” moment. After all that whining and bitching and moaning - had I gone to the doctor she wanted me to go to, I would have been sent away after the exam with the same instructions.

She closes out her day by sending me an email:

LM,

Another day and more bullshit with you. You go ahead and send S2 to school….if he winds up sicker, it will be sooner rather than later that you are in front of Judge Contempt explaining your intentions for renting that apartment A YEAR AGO. I gave you a chance to “move” back….and YOU’RE NOT.

As far as the DR. goes….you’ve taken them to the Dr. 3 times in 10 friggin years. I think I would know better than you which Dr.s are good and which aren’t. You just keep right on doin you’re own thing. I’m sick of this.

~PEW

She’s still a psycho. I said to DW, “Sure she’ll sue me. We’ll go into court. I’ll show them the doctor’s note clearing S2 for school and Judge Contempt (who has had enough of PEW’s bullshit at this point) will look at her and say, ‘what’s the problem, he followed the doctor’s instructions?’”

She’s like this with everything:

- An ear-infection is a catastrophe.
- If I give him too much Tylenol, I risk damaging his liver (meanwhile, she rotates through multiple pain-reliever fever-reducers on a regular basis).
- A minor sun-burn becomes sun-poisoning.
- Any minor cut is going to turn into tetanus.
- They have Fifth’s Disease.

She’s this way with almost everything! She also never lets an ailment run its course. She’s off to the doctor before the kids’ immune systems even have a chance to react because it makes her feel like an important, loving, concerned mother to others. If she’s not showing others she’s a good mother, then she doesn’t feel like a good mother. Then, she bolsters her own inflated self-image by recreating history and telling stories about how I simply neglected the children and their illnesses because I don’t rush to the doctor when they have a sniffle. The fact that she puts this on them, if you’ve read anything about hypochondria - is this is exactly the type of behavior that develops a hypochondriac.

Right before bed, his fever unexpectedly spiked. 103-degrees. I’ll be keeping him home today. Poor guy. Oh, and adding insult to the mildly aggravating circumstances - I unfold the doctor note and what do you think the receptionist wrote on it? “Pneumonia.”

This was only the beginning. She unleashed an “assault by communication” of near epic proportions…

…..

For People Who Are So Smart, You’re Idiots!

When the Kids are Sick, Email & Text Barrage