munchausens spouse survival tips help please??? thanks

Hi Tulip,

I can only imagine how tiring things would for you. How long have things been this way?

Setting clear boundaries around your husband's behavior could serve you some breathing space, and show your husband that certain behaviors are not rewarded.

Feeding into his fabrications can enable this behavior and reinforce it even more. It shows him that he can behave a certain way to get a certain result. The boy cried wolf did it because he knew it would lead to panic amongst the towns people. I doubt he would have done it had he known that it would create such a reaction.

There's this interesting article about setting boundaries which I've attached below. I hope you find it as useful as I did.

http://psychcentral.com/lib/10-way-to-build-and-preserve-better-boundaries/0007498

thankyou for the welcome and the replies to my first post.

lately i've been setting boundaries and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn't. i used to be very good at that but gradually i became eroded.

things have been difficult for our entire marriage of 30 years. when i was younger i coped better. the whole situation has warm me down more and more over time very gradually. my main trouble at present is knowing when to be assertive and when to ignore my husband's very strange behaviours. e.g. yesterday he turned on the heater and stood near it for a couple of hours in already very hot weather. then he took his temperature repeatedly and kept on saying that he had an infection and needed to see the gp and wanted me to drive him there. i did all the usual things to try and reassure him and calm his very demanding behaviours and then when i was driving the car out of the garage to go to the doctor with him he got out of the car 3 separate times and stood in front of the car and shouted at me to hurry up. by the 3rd time he did this i just loudly said ''get out of the way ....NOW'' then he got out of the way and got in the car as if the last 15 minutes had not even occurred. when he got in the car he looked around at all of our neighbours houses, checking to see if anyone saw or heard us. we went to the gp who ran urine tests, blood tests, other routine checks etc. and when the gp said that everything was within normal range but he would send blood & urine to pathology lab as a precaution, my husband demanded that i drive him to the emergency department at the hospital. there we spent several hours with several nurses, doctors including specialists all examining him.....but no physical evidence was found to back up his reported symptoms. they admitted him for observations and he is still there for a second night tonight. they have not suggested psych referral yet. last time he did a similar thing at a different hospital, they suggested psych assessment when no physical evidence was found.

then he got aggressive and told them they had he wrong idea and he refused all psych. referrals offered.

when i went to see him tonight i was astounded that they were keeping him there. he was sitting up in bed watching tv, laughing and having a great time. it is all a big game to him. i took him fresh clothes and toiletries and he said ''what are you doing here ?'' ''you can get out and go home now'' .

i was so exhausted that i just said ''o.k. i'll see you tomorrow'' and then i went home and watered the plants at home and filled the bird baths. i kept on thinking how nice it is when he is not here. but... i don't know how i can muster the strength to face the next installment with him tomorrow. he has always hated christmas and despite my efforts over the years i've never really been able to work out or find out why. the most i ever managed to get him to say to me about it was years ago when he told me that he does not like christmas because others might give him presents and then expect him to reciprocate and he said he doesn't want to spend any money.

he demanded that we go to a very expensive local restaurant for christmas lunch this year and we have booked and paid for it at his insistence ages ago as the restaurant requires. the nurse looking after him tonight at the hospital told me that he demanded that she organise gate leave for him tomorrow so he can go to this booked lunch.she told me that is o.k. but she thinks they might discharge him in the morning before that anyway. she said that he demanded that he return to the ward he is admitted to after he finishes his christmas lunch. they have him in a surgical ward in a shared room with 3 women patients because that is the only bed they had for him. it is hard to understand why he manipulates these situations. i don't know if he is trying to provoke an argument with me or if he is just so scrambled in his thinking that he doesn't even know why he is doing it himself. i used to really love christmas before i married him. now it is just a case of preparing for the strangest possible thing he will do each year and trying to remain calm, patient, strong and loving. on tuesday night after they admitted him to the surgical ward he demanded that i buy him potato chips from a machine that was actually an atm in the emergency ward foyer. i managed to leave at 2 am that time and the next night he ordered me out at 6pm.

thanks for reading this. sorry if it is garbled. i'm just so tired. i know he cannot help the way he is but it is hard to reconcile that with some of his very elaborate manipulations especially when tells me that he has to ''do the best performance'' to get the doctors to do what he says. he orders the nurses around so rudely too. i think he sent me away tonight because he is worried that i'll tell the nurses and doctors more information about him than he does and he does not want them to catch on to what he is doing. some of his ''acting'' is very poor and i am sure that they can see that it is not normal for a 53 year old man to say ''look at me i am shivering'' and then proceed to wave his arms and head up and down and say this so-called shivering is proof he has a fever....but his temperature is normal during all of his obs. thanks for this forum. i'm so tired i cannot type any more just now. i will try to sleep so i have energy to deal with whatever comes next.

Hi @tulip Welcome to the forums. I'm sorry to hear that you're going through such a rough time. I hope you can get some rest. Do you have any support?

Thanks everyone for your thoughts and replies. on christmas day my husband was given 2 hours gate leave so he could attend the restaurant lunch he demanded. luckily the restaurant is only 5 minutes from hospital.

he only ate a couple of mouthfuls of food and then said the food was too stringy and that he didn't like it. it was a christmas buffet with traditional and modern christmas food and extra gourmet foods too. he said he was too unwell to get his own food from the buffet so i said i would get it for him if he told me what he wanted. i got the biggest exercise workout i've had for a very long time when he kept me literally running back and forth to the bufffet getting all the foods he asked for which he looked at and then rejected except for a couple of bites of fish. i also got up and down to refill his water glass constantly.

after about 1/2 an hour of that i told him i had to get something to eat and drink for me. he put his head in his hands and leant on the table. i got the food i wanted and sat down and ate it. it was very nice.

he told me to have champagne but i don't know why he said that because i don't drink alcohol. i reminded him that i don't drink alcohol and i was sticking to water. he looked puzzled and asked why. instead of going into explanations or engaging with his attempts to draw me into this weird dialogue i simply said that as i was driving i would not risk drinking alcohol. he accepted that and then told me to get him pavlova from the dessert buffet. i got it for him and he ate all of it.

i took him back to hospital where we reported to the nurses station that he was back from his 2 hour gate leave.he said "you can leave now'' so i did.

on boxing day he was like a different person. he was saying how happy he was that the doctor told him he could go home the next day. today when i went to pick him up to go home he said they wanted to keep him there for at least 3 more days. when i asked the medical staff what was happening they said that is what he told them and that they were expecting to discharge him today as planned since all his routine tests were normal.

they told me that he demanded additional urine tests before leaving hospital, they told him these were not needed. he told them he was insisting on more tests and that his private health fund would cover the costs. more tests were done. all of this happened this morning while i was finally getting a few hours sleep because i needed it before going to collect him to bring him home as originally planned for 2pm today. i had to piece together the snippets of information he told me when i got to the hospital this afternoon. i had to try to make sense of all this in combination with what the nurses and doctor told me.i have had a few hours sleep over the last couple of nights which although not much is still better than nothing.

Later today nurses told me the test results came back from the hospital pathology service just before i arrived at hospital thinking that i would be taking my husband home as planned. the new urine test results show multi-drug resistant e coli. Now they are keeping him there for intravenous antibiotics for a few more days to treat this infection.

he seems to be very much enjoying having the cannula in his hand and watching the drip of antibiotics which they started him on this afternoon. they told him that he has to try and drink more fluids and if he cannot drink more water then they will put a separate saline drip through the same cannula as the antibiotics. all of his obs are still normal. there are no signs of infection and no symptoms. perhaps he is asymptomatic.

i am not surprised that something came up with him just immediately prior to what should have been his hospital discharge time. i don't know how the e coli got in his urine but i suspect that he deliberately contaminated the specimen jar they gave him for providing the urine sample for the new test he demanded, or maybe he deliberately contaminated the urine sample. i have caught him doing this in a different hospital once before, a few years ago. when he did it last time he said he had to do it to get antibiotics. he is obsessed with antibiotics most of the time. he loudly insults any doctors who won't prescribe antibiotics for him and then he doctor shops for a different doctor. i often hope that something can be done to keep better records of this type of thing so that doctors can look up these patterns of behaviour and be made aware of them. at present the privacy laws make this difficult when a person denies their mental health issues and refuses to acknowledge their situation. it makes it very difficult for me to try and tell the doctors and nurses because if i do that he starts yelling at me and calling me a ''meddling .....'' and saying ''you have to be punished''.

i sometimes think of a different life .... but not for very long because he is all consuming.

i had a very good and understanding gp until the end of 2012. he knew me and my husband and he understood what i was dealing with. unfortunately he left our medical centre and has now gone to work overseas. he has not been replaced at the medical centre. they cannot attract any doctors here because of the semi-rural location which is a long way from city resources.

it is so time consuming dealing with my husband's illness and living in this strange situation.

i told him that i would take his dirty washing home and bring him clean clothes and anything else he needed tomorrow. he loudly demanded that i go home and get him additonal deodorant and additional newspapers and return today. i said ''no, i don't have enough petrol for that just now. i'll go home and do the washing and bring you clean clothes and more deodorant and newspapers tomorrow. i'll get more petrol in the morning after i have some rest.'' he already has plenty of deodorant and newspapers with him. he gets a new paper every morning at the hospital and his deodorant is still virtually brand new.

washing and other household chores are done now. thanks for this forum. typing this stuff is helping me to process it. sorry for the bad typing and typos, that is just due to exhaustion. i hope this makes sense.

my husband's dad keeps on ringing up and leaving messages on our answering machine. he just left another one while i am typing this. i cannot deal with him and his messages because he is just like my husband only 30 years older. i just ignore the messages but save them on the machine for my husband to deal with if he ever comes home.

i definitely am thinking of planning a few days to myself in the lead up to christmas 2015. thank you for that idea.i have wanted to do that many times over the years but i never actually do it because i just don't want to come home to whatever my husband escalates, creates. destroys etc. if i go away.

i am getting past caring about that now...but practicalities mean i will still be the one who has to deal with my husband's sabotage whether deliberate or sort of accidental..as part of his illness.....it still has the same effect of destroying any tiny bit of normality and enjoyment that i ever get and it makes a huge lot of time consuming things to be cleaned up and sorted out.

today a nurse asked him if he needed any pain relief. he said ''no, i quite enjoy cannulas''.

the expression on her face seemed like she was stunned. i was glad she seemed to recognise what a strange thing it was for someone to say. it is good to see someone who recognises this stuff. i have grown accustomed to his strange behaviour and statements over many years.

i am seriously thinking about skipping a visit. that sounds like an excellent idea. he can enjoy his cannula and i can enjoy not visiting. i just have to come up with something he will accept as a reason for me skipping a visit. although he often orders me to go home when i visit he also contradicts himself and tells me he wants me to stay. i think i'll drop of his clean clothes and demanded additional deodorant and newspapers tomorrow and then say something like ''here are the things you asked for, i'm going now, i'll see you in a couple of days''.

my husband is due to be discharged from hospital on tuesday but when i visited him on monday night he was already escalating his extreme attention seeking behaviours to try to stay in hospital even longer.

e.g. he started saying it was dangerous for me to put anything down in his room. he said i had to hold everything including all his belongings and the hot chocolate i brought him at his request. he said he thinks he will stay in hospital for another day. he said i cannot sit down in his room and he said he won't sit on the visitor chairs near his room with me. i have had spinal surgery and i have permanent adjustments i need to do and i need to sit down at times.i cannot stand up for long periods which is what he wants me to do when i visit him. there are no visitor chairs in patient rooms because there is no space for them because the rooms are very tiny.

i asked the nurses for information because my husband is giving me contradictory information and they said all his tests are normal. the doctors will review him on tuesday morning.

i told him i knew what he was doing, and i saw what he did to fake symptoms to gain hospital admission. i told him that it is funny how we always have to go back to hospital 5 minutes after we get home from him being discharged. he started saying that he had to go there because he was very unwell. i told him that he knows he has a condition that he does not disclose to hospital staff and he just denied that and said he had to go to hospital because he was physically very sick. i told him that of course i have no problem if he needs medical help but that the problems only occur when he deliberately does things to himself to gain hospital admission.

he has been there for a week now. i told him it is time to come home now not time to move in. he is in a surgical ward but he has not had and does not need any surgery. they put him there because they don't have anywhere else to put him.

i told him i am not coming to see him again and i asked him to ask a staff member to phone me when he is ready to come home. i also asked the nurses to phone me when he is ready for discharge and they said o.k.

i am worried that i have done the wrong thing by telling him that i am onto his antics. i did it assertively because i thought it was important for him to know that i was not fooled by the things he does. i said to him that it is all just a big game to him.

this is the same pattern over and over again.

he lies to me about the doctors names and then i have to go through a very time consuming enquiry system at the hospital to find out who his treating doctors are. like many systems there are good and bad things aout it and there are also good and bad hospital staff. when you get a good one it is excellent but unfortunately the good ones are not rostered on all the time and the last few days there have only been staff who are not interested in anything about patient care at all. i phoned tonight to try and find out the name of the nursing unit manager and the after hours nursing unit manager gave me the name of the nursing unit manager for the ward and i will phone her tomorrow.

usually at this point my husband tries to involve his elderly parents. his dad is the same as him and his mum has dementia. i cannot deal with them and him.

when my husband started to go around in circles with the same old contradictory stuff about how unwell he is and then grin at me happily all the time he was seeing the tears come to my eyes i just said ''i'm going now i'm not going to get drawn into any of your things that you are trying to draw me into. ask one of the nurses to phone me when you are ready for discharge'' then i walked out.

it is so hard to know what to do. i have patiently and lovingly and optimistically looked after him for 30 years. my personal nature is a naturally a happy one. i have learned the hard way that the more i give, the more he takes. i know he has a disorder and that he cannot help having it but it is so hard to see the bizarre things that he does as if they are normal. inside i am screaming ''that is not normal !!! "

even when medical staff see his bizarre behaviours they do not do anything to address it. if he persuades them into keeping him there even longer i will just stay away from visiting him altogether. he just sits there watching the cricket on tv in hospital. he complains about the hospital food even though they offer him a choice of meals and snacks.

he demanded again that i bring him chips from the atm in the hospital foyer. i told him that is an automatic teller maching for people to get money out - it is not a chip vending machine. he said i could get chips out of it if i tried. all the time that he is loudly saying this to me, other hospital patients recovering from surgery are being helped along by nurses back to their beds from the bathrooms, and some are being moved along in their beds to and from surgery and other treatments. they all look at him with puzzled looks because he is sitting there fully dressed in a surgical ward happily snooping on others.

they moved him into a single room on sunday. i don't know why. maybe the other patients in his room complained about him having the tv on all night. he told me today that they have restricted his tea and coffee at mealtimes because they said he has insomnia because they saw him awake and watching tv all night on friday and saturday night. he refers to the nurses and doctors by their ethnic origins and they all look at him like he is some kind of white racist. i have asked him not to refer to people that way because it is not appropriate or relevant but he still keeps on doing it even more when he sees how much they don't like it.

i just feel like i wish they would keep him forever and give him the help he really needs. that is so hard for them to do when he has munchausens syndrome and refuses all acknowledgement and all psychological and psychiatric referrals and treatment.

thank you for this forum i hope that you can understand that even though my husband is the one with the mental health issue it is me who has to deal with all the strangeness and commotion in a world where people just do not care less. all the awareness raising and media campaigns are great where they do have good people who are understanding but in a semi rural location like mine where denial and ignoring is the usual thing even in the so-called helping professions it makes is so incredibly much more difficult to get any support and understanding.

i bet he is sleeping soundly in his single room with air conditioning while i am exhausted, wide awake and melting in the searing heat tonight.

it seems to defy belief that he would rather stay in a tiny hospital room for the christmas and apparently new year period too, rather than relax at home during his holidays.

the staff at the hospital are mostly very good and working hard to do their best in a crumbling old hospital building with scarce resources and old equipment that is falling apart. mostly they smile and do their best but there are some who just don't seem to care about anything at all and yet others who have resorted to their own survival techniques of switching off, being silly or simply turning a blind eye.

i am living in some kind of twilight zone where my husband gets hospital admission when they find nothing wrong with him and other poor people have to wait on lists for ages for surgery that they need.

what do others do to survive ?

thanks.

hello eagle and sandy.

thank you for your replies.

i spoke with the after hours nursing unit manager last night and she was very understanding and helpful.she offered to speak to the nursing staff and the ward matron for me.she did that today.

they had my husband ready for discharge this morning but thanks to the ward matron and the kindness of the nurses and doctor who the matron also spoke with, they kept my husband in the ward until mid- afternoon.

this gave me three more hours sleep and time to get things done without having him under my feet complaining.

i got washing, garden watering, minor garden storm repairs, basic house cleaning and bill paying done.

the nurse rostered on to look after my husband phoned me this morning and again this afternoon to make sure i was o.k. before i went to get him.

they offered community nurse follow-up which he has agreed to !!!

he thinks it is follow up for physical stuff but they have told me that they recognised his frequent flyer admissions after twice in the xmas season being admitted with contradictory stories.

xmas & new year is when he is at his worst and when he most wants admissions to hospitals for no actual reason.

i am getting better again at saying no to him. i still anticipate that he will blow up though whenever i say it. sometimes it works and sometimes it does not.

sleep is my priority. i will be o.k. with sleep once i get back into a routine. then i will leave my husband to all his doctors appointments in the next few weeks as he has said that he is able to drive himself to them now. if he sticks to that i will use that time to catch up on my favourite tv show called ''outnumbered''. i have seen all the episodes before when it was first on tv a few years ago but whenever they repeat it these days i record it to watch it again.

i have a couple of episodes of it that i haven't had a moment to watch due to my husband's latest escapades.

i like that show because it is funny and clever and it gives me hope that normal families do exist.

i am not officially my husband's carer because he is employed full-time. he is currently on annual holidays. i am retired from work. his last very big dramas were at the time of my retirement mid 2014.

i had been looking forward to it very much after a lifetime of work. i managed to enjoy only a few hours of retirement when he began demanding attention extremely inappropriately. it took me months to even begin to recover from that and just when i was starting to recover he started the whole thing again at the end of november, gradually escalating things until xmas. he usually does really strange stuff on new years eve too but then crashes a bit on new years day.

it is more like caring for a mentally ill child than an adult. he argues with everyone about everything.

i wonder sometimes how i didn't see through his manipulations before we got married. basically he fooled me by pretending to be normal and then after we were married the cracks started to appear.

after he got more and more comfortable in our relationship he just let all his munchausens stuff come out and he stopped trying to hide it from me.

the hot weather here makes it hard to sleep. once it passes that will help.

i know people talk about the importance of ''me time''. i think i will make 2015 the year for me. i am going to try to leave my husband's care to the professionals as much as possible. even though my husband denies his munchausens, he spends a lot of time at the local medical centre asking nurses to check him for various non-existent ailments and asking if a new gp has been employed there yet.

now we have the community nurse to keep tabs on him thanks to the hospital organising it.

i don't feel so guilty about leaving him to others now. i look at these times as opportunities to do something for me. so far it has just been chores but i am going to try and fit in a movie if i can.

even though i am in a semi-rural location , i do live very close to a regional cinema.

sleep for me now. thanks everyone. i don't know what i would have done without this forum over the last few days.