Punctuated with Julie’s actual medical records, it 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. Sickened is a remarkable memoir that speaks in an original and distinctive Midwestern voice, rising to indelible scenes in prose of scathing beauty and fierce humor. 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.
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. Sickened 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. 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. Her mother, on the other hand, seems curiously excited. It’s four o’clock, and she hasn’t been allowed to eat anything all day. Just twelve, she’s tall, skinny, and weak. A young girl is perched on the cold chrome of yet another doctor’s examining table, missing yet another day of school.
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