I’m late to the party, and I am putting myself out there with this comment:

I was the lying patient.

For years, I struggled with serious mental health issues, and chronic attention seeking was one of them. I LOVED attention. It was my heroin. I would do shameless things to get people to look at me/pay attention to me. It was 10/10 cringeworthy.

I will say, I also have ADD, and I found that pretending to be sick got me out of class. So I pretended to be more sick.

I pretended to have cancer scares (these were my favorite, because it worked so well), kidney stones, infection, dangerous fevers, seizures, and moments of not being able to breathe. Sometimes, I faked heart problems by secretly doing strenuous exercise, and then saying I had extreme chest pain.

The most memorable, was pretending to have Tourette’s. It was so dramatic, and everyone was freaked out at my “sudden screaming fits.” The neurologist took one look at me, and said to my parents: “There’s nothing wrong with her.”

I got better, and I hate the doctor’s office now. It especially got better, when I was no longer in school. But I always want to find my old doctors/people I scared, and apologize for wasting their time. Writing this made me so disgusted with myself, but I wanted to provide perspective from a faking patient.