Women who hurt, smother, or kill their own babies are the most common presentation of Munchausen syndrome. These psychopaths murder their babies one after the other and hope the doctors think it’s sudden infant death syndrome, or SIDS. And most of the time they do-that is, until someone realizes it has happened nine times. Many of these women are interested in the nursing profession in some manner or form. They like to be involved in medical procedures, because it gives them the thrill of controlling life and death. They like pulling plugs and causing emergencies so they can be heroes when they save the patients. Or they like to watch everyone else scurry about trying to save the person they just sent into cardiac arrest. They also love a good funeral.
When this mother eventually sat down next to her son, he looked at her like she was a big cockroach and he moved away from her. I thought, That’s an odd response to your mother. For the rest of the day the mother ignored him and spent almost no time tending to her poor, miserable son, but she said to the nurses, “I can’t leave his side. No, I can’t go down to eat now, I must stay with him.” Yet she never looked at him. The woman enjoyed talking with me about herself. She bragged about this and that and most of what she said was not all that believable. She never talked about her son, about how he was doing in college or about his deafness, nor did she express any worry over his possible future demise. She was narcissistic and grandiose and lacked empathy for her own flesh and blood, all traits of a psychopath.
I wondered if this woman could be the Munchausen type who liked working in the medical field.
I said to her, “Are you a nurse?”
“Yes, I am,” she said, beaming at me.
“Do you work in a nursing home?”
“Yes.”
“Midnight shift?”
She nodded, looking at me suspiciously, wondering how I knew that.
I thought, I wonder if they have any suspicious deaths at that nursing home?
I asked the nurses if they knew where the son had been recently. They said he had just gotten back from visiting his mother in Chicago when his kidneys failed.
I thought about whether the mother administered something from the nursing home to her son, some kind of drug that caused kidney failure. I asked whether they had tested him for drugs or any kind of medications that could be available in a medical setting, and they said no, because they had no reason to test for that. Yet none of the tests they had done offered any clue as to why this boy’s kidneys had suddenly gone into failure.
When I couldn’t stand being alone with my suspicions another minute, I went to the hospital authorities. “Look,” I said, “I’m breaking the code of ethics but I cannot stand by and watch this. I’m not saying I know that this woman did anything to her son. I’m saying you need to test for medications that she could have gotten from her place of work.”
I explained Munchausen syndrome by proxy, and they all looked at me like I had horns growing out of my head. They didn’t know a thing about it. That’s not surprising; most medical staff never learns of this form of psychopathy and that’s why so often women get away with it.
The blank looks told me they just weren’t getting it. I said, as I was leaving the room, “If he ever ends up dead in the future, you better check that mom out.” The young man survived, and I hope he was smart enough to never get near her again.
ONE NIGHT I received a phone call from Washington Hospital Center -they needed an interpreter on a rape case.
I went in and the victim was Rochelle, a deaf woman I knew from many previous visits.
“Rochelle-you were raped?”
“Yeah.”
She was smiling at me when she signed it. I thought, You don’t look too bent out of shape for a rape victim.
She went through the whole process.
Medical technicians papered the floor, removed her clothes and put them on the paper, and the doctor performed the rape kit. Afterward, the police came in and talked with her through me.
She claimed that she got off a bus and was attacked and raped by a man in an alley. But after the doctor and the police detective left the room, she brightened up and started digging around in her purse for her photo book.
“Hey, wanna see my pictures from the Christmas party?” she asked cheerfully.
I oohed and aahed over her various poses with friends and then she asked me how my kids were doing and I told her some funny stories and she laughed. But when the doctor returned, she “got sad again” very quickly.
The very next night, my pager went off again at midnight, this time from DC General, and there was another rape victim waiting for an interpreter.
Sure enough, it was Rochelle.
“Rochelle, did you get raped again?”
“Yes!” She looked at me with an amazed, innocent expression.
Apparently she got off another bus and got raped for the second time in two days. Of course, the doctors did their job, she got the rape kit done again, and Rochelle got a great deal of attention. She was mad they didn’t have any crackers available that night.
I SAW WHAT a lot of people would never see, because they see only what a person presents to them. When a doctor encounters a patient, the patient is ready for the doctor, and the doctor observes only what happens in the ten minutes that he or she is in the room with the patient.
As an interpreter, I sat in rooms with patients sometimes for up to twenty-four hours straight, so I learned a lot about those patients. Many told me stories about their entire lives. Some would ask me for food; some for other favors. I would get all the lowdown on them, and when they switched hospitals to play the game on the next well-meaning but oblivious medical professional, I was often the interpreter there, too. Most of my clients were nice people, but there were those who were not. These were the users and abusers and the criminals, and among them there were a number of psychopaths. There are a lot more psychopaths in society than people realize, and deaf people can be psychopaths, too. They murder, they rape, and sometimes they rape deaf girls because they know they won’t hear them coming. This kind-the deaf psychopaths-lied in front of me all the time to the doctors. They knew I knew, but they didn’t care that I knew because I couldn’t say anything.
I saw behind the charade that psychopaths use to fool people. Psychopaths, whenever they encounter a particular person they want something from, put on their game face-they lie and manipulate-and I was in the unusual situation of watching them ply their trade.
AND SO THAT was my life. I taught my kids and I worked at the hospitals. When the kids were a little bit older, I worked at night a lot more. When my husband was home, I could go down to the emergency room and work all night, and I managed to live that life for ten years.
That would have been the totality of my life if, along the way, Walt Williams hadn’t moved into our spare room as a boarder.
MY HUSBAND WORKED hard.
He was an engineer for Siemens Medical Systems, where he still works today, fixing x-ray equipment. He was a very, very good father to the kids. We had a family bed when the children were babies. He slept with our daughter on his chest, put her to sleep when she wasn’t nursing, and, as the children got older, he was always involved with their activities.
When they were of school age, he was the soccer coach in town. Everybody loved him. He was involved with the Boys and Girls Clubs. He was a great dad.
Our life as husband and wife, however, had its problems. None stemmed from being of two different cultures or races. I had his support for homeschooling the children and being a sign language interpreter. The years of investigating Walt after that fateful day at the police station was another matter.