Should I have a word with friend about her frequent docs visits?

[Flairmaine]

Been mates for years. She's lovely. Have coffee once every week - 2 weeks. Our kids are both 3 and they get on v well. Before she had her son she was always at the docs. Probably once every couple of weeks. Headaches that she thought were brain tumors, whenever she had a fever, whenever she had a cough that lasted more than a few days, when her glands were up if she had a temp. The list goes on. It's endless. Now she has a son, she seems to take him to the docs every couple of weeks. He's not breathing properly so he's got asthma, he has a red mark on his arm so he has meningitis, he didn't sleep properly for 2 nights so he must have something seriously wrong with him.

She's taken him to a&e 9 or 10 times that I can remember and every single time there was nothing wrong with him. She was considering calling an ambulance the other day because a small plastic bit of his toy was missing and she wondered if he had swallowed it (it was a tiny round thing that would have just passed).

Part of me says I should just let her crack on, but equally I think it's really unhealthy and I'm genuinely quite worried about her.

AIBU? Should I just leave her to it? I'm just a worried friend and not looking to interfere as such. She doesn't have any signs of munchausens and I think it is a genuine, but extreme health anxiety. Equally I don't want to risk our friendship. Wwyd?

Totally agree you can talk someone out of it and shouldn't be stern. But you can gently point out that she's being irrational. Maybe she doesn't realise she has health anxiety and that there is help available. It might be a relief.

Talk to her.

I had health anxiety. It helped me when someone pointed out what was happening, in a kind and supportive way. I knew in some ways because I understood the anxiety was not proportionate to the potential threat, but it takes a lot to truly start believing that.

It was one of the worst periods of my life, and the fear was horrific. Reassurance just keeps the cycle going. My family understood that and tried to limit it.

As awful as it felt at the time to not get the constant reassurance I wanted, in the long run it helped when they limited it. Speaking to her in the middle of the night is not helping her in the long run. It's ok to have some boundaries around this.

CBT helped. I am mostly recovered. I do get anxious about my heart still, but it is manageable now.

My son also has HA, since losing his dad to cancer as a child.

it definitely sounds like she has health anxiety which can be really debilitating and must be having an awful impact on her day to day life. Please don’t follow the advice of telling her she’s a drain on the NHS and to stop. She needs support and compassion which it sounds like she has in you.

i have health anxiety, which is fortunately under control.

CBT helped me massively, something the NHS arranged for me through my GP. My trigger was also the death of a loved one at a young age.

I believed every ailment was serious, and unfortunately the mind can then trick the body into feeling physical symptoms that just aren’t there.

I also found myself overly questioning every ailment in my children too. The fear of me dying or losing my children was so great it consumed me.

I still find myself sometimes slipping back into my old ways - intensely checking my body, symptom checking, seeking reassurance from anyone at all. It’s something that may never go away, but she can certainly get help, which will give her some peace from the constant fight/flight state she’s currently in.

Your support will mean a lot to her - your friend is lucky to have you.

I had this and was diagnosed with OCD. She needs a psychiatric assessment and medication.
How you suggest this to her I don't know. It depends how close you really are, I guess.

I have bad health anxiety, but even within that we have a choice. I know I have health anxiety and I also know that the NHS is overwhelmed, and I have friends who are doctors who are stretched beyond belief, so even though I have health anxiety I limit going to the doctor.

I actually think it IS helpful as a friend to give her some perspective, in her world this has become normal and it isn’t, it’s not good for her, her kid or the NHS. I would feedback to her that most people don’t go to the doctor so often, and that if she has excessive anxiety about health you would be able to support her by going to see a Doctor about it and there are lots of practical ways to reduce that anxiety.

That is what a friend is for.

^This

I have also suffered acute health anxiety at times in my life as have a chronic albeit mostly managed condition that is life threatening. I daily make choices of whether to see a doctor and that is the difference, being rational enough to chose.

My boys are autistic and Ds1 has adhd, too. When he was younger, he launched himself at the safety gate to the kitchen, knocking it free, and flew across the Itchen, landing on the hard tiled floor, hurting his wrist. He wouldn't let me near it nd it was bright red. DH raced home from work and took him to paediatric A&E. By the time he was seen, he was fine, just a ittle grazed.

Told we were right to be concerned, though.

At least with animals and vets an anxious owner has to pay for the exam.
Sadly I can see the day when missed appointments and “ Wasted resources” will see a cost at point of use. :(

I'd be more worried about her poor son and the affect it will be having on his current and future mental health, living like this, especially in his "formative years". If she can help herself she might avoid passing her phobias on to him.

It won't work

You: you're wasting hospital resources by visiting
Her: But there's something wrong with him
You: No there isn't
Her: But you don't know that for sure.

To her the threat to her child is real. She's not being dramatic and expecting a Dr to see her because she's special. She's expecting a Dr to see her because something is wrong.

@Flairmaine next time she asks I'd approach it as a "in worried about how worried you always seem to be, it must be so exhausting" etc

But how do yo u define wasted resources! Just if you go and the Dr can't diagnose something? So you get a lump, Dr says it's nothing, yo u get fined. Next lump, yo u refuse to go. Cancer.

Have you tried getting a GP appointment lately?! I can’t get one till mid December! Clogging up doctors appointments because she’s paranoid is no joke and not fair to others who genuinely do need medical attention.

I completely agree that this does NOT sounds like munchausens by proxy. I am a child of a mother that had that munchausens and it was nothing like your description. My hospital visits never showed NOTHING wrong with me, as my mother would MAKE ME UNWELL so that there was always a reason I was in a hospital or being taken to the GP or in the back of an ambulance… people with that know full well they have it, and are extremely devious with how they carry it out. My mum would do as much research about whatever it is she wanted me to have, and then try to induce an illness that mimicked the symptoms. Although I would have tests done over time for certain things that would come back as fine, there was always enough of real symptoms that even caused the doctors enough concern to send me for these tests, and at one time an actual operation… because of the clever ways my mum did it. My childhood memories involve being poisoned, waking up to horrific burns (poured a kettle over my arm whilst I slept. Said I slept walked ) memories of being genuinely unwell, but my mum pouncing on the real illness and making it worse- wrapping me in layers and duvets if I already had a fever (she managed to get a real seizure out of me once from doing that ) not giving me antibiotics when I actually needed them, but instead making the illness worse (forced to eat crisps with tonsillitis) inducing allergic reaction type symptoms and managing to get me diagnosed as allergic to penicillin- this was all easier when I was growing up. When records were mostly written. When she could take me to different hospitals hours away and successfully give a fake name, when she could move us to another area and eventually managing to get things put into my records that were not true (epilepsy is something that was on my medical records for a long time and was something she kept consistent through my childhood. Mostly by making me faint and then I have memories of waking up having my head bashed on the floor over and over by her.) it was a confusing and horrid childhood. By the time I realised it wasn’t right, I still didn’t understand what exactly it was. And my mum has always taught me about insane asylums so once when I dared to confront her, she said I was sick in the head and I would end up in an asylum. I also became like Stockholm syndrome.. as a teen I remember even inducing or fabricating my own illnesses, as the most warped thing about it all was that the only time I ever felt loved was when I was ‘sick’ and she played the role of the doting mother. The rest of my existence was miserable. I was home schooled , only child , never knew my dad, never even met my mums family. She had moved far away from them and they had not spoke for years. They didn’t know I existed for many years. My mother died when I was a young adult and thankfully never got to know her grandkids (I would not have let her near them if she had been alive anyway) my son has severe disabilities and I just always think what a cruel twist of fate it was to end up with a child that my mum would have loved and thrived off… she wouldn’t have had to make anything up. He’s seriously unwell a lot of the time. I am a very messed up adult still trying to recover from childhood. I hate hospitals now and hate being unwell, but have to spend time in hospital with my son. All health professionals know my background as I share it with them- my fear of hospitals can bring on panic attacks and PTSD…. Sorry I didn’t mean to waffle on… but when people shout munchausens from something like this post, it does make me frustrated. Health anxiety is not the same thing. Not even close.

How awful for her son! It's well and good for her to have health anxiety and not deal with it, but it's impacting his life. Getting dragged to the doctors and a&e this frequently is going to cause him to pick up anxieties of his own at a young age. It's also extremely disruptive to his own state of mind being dragged into an A&E environment for no reason. This isn't just about her and what's best for her anymore - it's what's best for her child!

I do hope the GP and A&E pick up on this and talk to her. My worry is they are so overburdened, it might not. You can't really diagnose if this anxiety will escalate to the point she doesn't let him leave the house for fear he'll get ill. Or gets controlling in other ways. Unmanaged anxiety always gets worse with age and loss of control.

Please talk to her and suggest she get help asap. For her son's sake.

If medically-trained personnel haven’t diagnosed her or her child with anything (that she has told you about) then it is none of your business. If they are concerned, then they will flag this with other allied health professionals like psychologists, etc. Zip it and change the subject.

She sees you as a safe non judgmental person to confide her fears to. She probably knows she’s too anxious because she doesn’t want anyone to really know including her husband. What she probably doesn’t realize is how she looks to others and obsessing over jumping to medical conclusions. That would explain her getting upset at dr telling her what he did. You could suggest she not look up everything on the internet that feeds this anxiety based on nothing, it is transference really, and gently tell her that some people do this when they should be calm and logical about such things, and that those people might give appearance of instability to their children instead of a calm, logical adult.

There are children who have been abused consistently to the point of death, and no one has picked up on it - not medical professionals, teachers or social workers. And the constant refrain is why did no one say something - especially when you hear people say they had concerns. But no one wanted to get involved.

So with something so much less visible and minor in comparison, there's no guarantee an overworked GP or Hospital will notice it. You'd hope they would, but things do slip through the cracks. I mean there's a nurse atm on trial for allegedly murdering dozens of children in a hospital, and no medical staff picked up on it as suspicious until it was far too late - because they were short staffed and over burdened.

As friends and family, we DO have a duty to discuss if something looks like it may be causing damage to a child. Whether they listen or not, you can't control but it would be very amiss to just ignore it.

Hopefully it will lessen as the child gets older. It is very easy to worry about this kind of stuff. When people have a baby they usually don’t have lots of knowledge/experience about health matters and it’s logical to worry when the child has a rash, a fever, whatever. I would just listen to her. It is really down to the GP to sort out - there are loads of GP visits and all the A&E visits are reported to them.

This is good advice. I was anxious as a young adult and then later to a lesser degree when my child was little, but it did lessen with time.

Why bless her? She isn't cute or needing sympathy. She is damaging her child with this ridiculousness of hers. She hopefully will be flagged and something be done.

Not RTFT but the fact she conceals this from her partner is a matter of concern, and for this alone, behaviour that has an impact on his child is a compelling reason for telling them.

Can she ring 111 instead as a kind of pre-cursor to wasting others time

@sorenlorenson1 How awful! So sorry your childhood was like this 😟💐

I would say something. Not entirely sure what but she needs to avoid her child becoming anxious as well.