"They've been in here"

Let me tell you about L. I've known her for almost ten years. I have not seen her consistently, she has gone away and come back. Each times she comes back it is with a completely new set of difficulties.

L was referred to me by a local MD who she had been plaguing for years. She always had things going wrong medically. By the time I saw her she had colostomy surgery as well as bladder surgery. She also reported hearing problems, as well as lots of dental things and other physical rearrangements that I can't recall.

She began to see me regularly for a while. She began to trust me and to tell me the things that had happened to her, and around her during her life. To go into the details now would take not a small book, but a large one.


Part of what I want to say here is that this is true of everyone. Even you. Even me, and my life looks so structured, regular and ordinary. But lives go on over time and they get very complex, with many minor characters playing roles, and major characters repeating the same scene slightly differently, hoping for a different ending/

L had a very religious mother, who, under stress, would pray for hours. L was one of four daughters, so the stress was pretty constant as it sounds like each of the daughters went in her own direction with vengeance. L was a good student, but sensitive, withdrawn and anorexic.

She had a marriage, a child, a divorce, and struggled as a single parent. She met another man and they both drank a bit too much together, so her ex-husband took the kid. The other man would hit her when he drank. So they kept separating and reuniting each time he got sober. But then he died of complications of being a sloppy drunk.

She was alone and depressed for a while, that is when the medical problems, real and imagined began. By the time I got to see her she was in her late 30s and isolated. She had the kind of job she could do by herself, and she was seeing no one but doctors. They were the only people she trusted.

I became one of those people, and after a year of seeing me she began to feel a little better and function a little better, and stopped getting operations. Then I didn't see her for a while.

When she returned to the confines of my comfy office a few years later she told me about having gotten involved with another man, and that was good sometimes and not good sometimes, but she gave up on the relationship because he was still too involved with his own kids, and they seemed to have tons of problems of their own.

While she was seeing me, and this was about three years ago now, she met a guy whom she had known before, way back in her past. This guy she knew to be a charmer and maybe somehow involved in the local drug trade, but not working for Pfizer or Merck.

She fell kind of hard for this guy, and from what I could tell he took quick advantage of that. I never asked for the details but I got the sense that L, a woman from a very strict Catholic family, turned and twisted herself through many positions and acts that she had never done before.

Sometime about the third week of this romance the guy didn't show up when she expected him, and he has not reappeared since.

At first she was upset, then broken hearted, but then her thinking began to get worse. She began to sense that it was obvious to he world that she had done things she should not have done. She began to withdraw again, but also to look over her shoulder a bit.

I tried very hard to work with her on this, to keep her out in the world, to deal with her heartbreak and guilt. At first I felt like we had made progress. Her fears seem to diminish. There were a few strange comments about salesgirls watching her, or other people being rude to her, but she was back doing things.

And then she faded away from me again. I didn't see her for six months or so.

By the time she came back she had lost it. She told me that the people in her neighborhood were talking about her. They were watching her come and go. They were checking out what she wore.

Two months later they were coming into her apartment. She could tell because there were spots on her clothes, or stitches ripped, or scratches on her jewelery. Also, her laundry had spots on it. Her shoes were being switched with others that were a slightly different size. Someone poked a hole in her boot. The cheese in her refrigerator had turned greeen.

Why would anyone to do this to her? Because they didn't want her to have nice clothes or a good life.

She began to call the police. They came. They checked things out. They left.
She called them back, and again, and again. Now they are sick of her and she is angry at them.

They have called me, and I have spoken to them. They are afraid to not respond. They and I can't do much because she is not really a danger to herself or anyone else.

When I try to be rational with her she talks right over me. When I want to get her to someone who can give her medication she gets furious. "It's their problem, those nuts who keep breaking in here. It's not me. Why should I go on pills?"

Now she has let me know that there are cameras in her apartment. Not to watch for intruders, but for the intruders to see where she hides things. Has she found them? No. When I asked her how much it bothers her to have cameras in her apartment she kind of smiled. "If they want to watch me all the time, they can go right ahead." She later told me that now she makes sure her hair is always washed and brushed.

Everyone wants to be a star.

What I'm telling you is that this is not at all rational or reasonable and L seems to know that. But it takes up almost all of her life. It's like an addiction, an obsession. It's with her all the time. She wouldn't know what to do without it. She does nothing a rational person would do to stop it, or to find out who it is. She had her locks changed once, but that didn't stop them.

When I tell her it would take 100 people and a half a million dollars to make all this happen she seems pleased. She is sure that the police are covering the evidence, the apartment management is also, and all her neighbors have been told to keep quiet. But she doesn't care. She is going to do whatever she wants. They can't stop her.

Sometimes I get three voice mail messages a day from her, listing what has been stained, snipped or stretched. I call her back twice a week and see her once a week. She rages on about how these nuts are trying to limit her life and not let her have nice things. She will go on as long as I listen. Then I tell her to calm down and take it easy for the rest of the evening. She says "thank you" very politely, and hangs up.

I don't know how it will end, or if it will. I had one case that was worse than this. For a while I saw a woman who clearly had been very attractive at one time, but when I saw her she was worse than L in her paranoia. She even thought the birds were spreading messages about her. Only once did she let it out that all this began when she was young and beautiful and had a long affair with a priest.

The irony of course is that L always said that the way everyone knew about her is from some website that was writing all about her.

Now who is to blame for that?