Healthcare Professionals Tell About the Most Outlandish Fakers They Ever Saw in Hospitals

I gave her a bunch of pain medication so we could get an ultrasound. Ultrasound showed nothing. The urine pregnancy test showed nothing.

Beta HCG was 0….. Turns out she was conveniently on her period which made the whole thing very convincing.

Definitely was a ‘wow she just made up this entire thing.’

We had a lovely conversation about all the results.

She ended up screaming at me, threatening to sue me for all I’m worth and stormed out. Jokes on her I’m worth -$200K of student loan debt.”

He didn’t weight much (5th percentile). All of this, with a right arm length 2 cm more than the left side, was borderline criteria for Silver-Russell.

Did genetic testing, which came back negative, but 30% of cases are negative.

So the deciding factor was one of the ‘soft’ criteria of hypoglycemia.

But when the kid was in the hospital, he was never hypoglycemic. He went home and came back in a coma a few weeks later.

Again, as soon as he was eating normally at the hospital, he was never hypoglycemic.

She starved her child into comas repeatedly for the diagnosis of Silver-Russell.

Once I had enough of her lies and walked into the room after only knocking once. She was walking around normally and jumped into the wheelchair as soon as she saw me.

I believe it was for money since, in Canada/Quebec, you get money when your child has a genetic disability…

And that she kept forgetting which side was supposed to be her weaker side when working with PT/OT. Or that she was caught Googling aphasia symptoms on her phone (despite being completely unable to read simple words at the evaluation).

She was trying to get on disability. And wouldn’t you know it, as soon as she was told workman’s comp won’t pay and that she would not be able to drive for an indefinite amount of time (after just having such a severe stroke, after all) the next day her speech and language symptoms were completely resolved.

A couple of years later, I see a woman for the exact same thing. Literally talking on the phone, chatting it up with family present but as soon as I come in, her language falls apart.

Even the elderly mother comments, ‘It’s so strange how she was just talking to us just fine but you have her try to read or say a couple of words aloud and it’s impossible!

‘…I’ll be right back.’

I check her chart and pull up old notes. My old notes. It’s the same woman as before.

I tell the physician about her faking, and he’s on the same page as me.

The best part was walking back into the room and having her ask, ‘So when can I get outta here and start driving again?’

The look on her face a when I said that made it almost worth all the time I had to waste on her jerking me around with her malingering.

We tell him to stand up, so we can take him to the ambulance. He does and starts walking to the door.

We tell him to hold up, gotta pay your bill first. Man, was he mad at us. Waitress tells us he does this all the time.

So much water. It was like that scene in Coneheads. She said it was her water breaking. Again, I quickly ruled her out and told her she needed to go home.

She subsequently peed the bed before leaving.”

She was a known substance abuser as well. She had been caught stealing needles and shoving them up under her huge sweaty rolls.

The only reason my mom found out was because she came back in to place the EKG pads, and to do so, she had to lift her chest up to place the pad.

From that point on, they had to have a member of security watching her any time a nurse or doctor left the room.

She also had a massive arrest record and there were times the cops would bring her to the ER instead of an ambulance.”

If we didn’t give narcs he would shut that place down screaming and threatening. She would also spy on the parking lot to see which doctors were working because Dilaudid.

Well, one day I had it.

I just let her go. Then she got threatening, so I called security, and I was the first person to ever get her removed.

She then proceeds to walk out the doors with her son and not fifteen minutes later, she is back in the ER as a trauma, full collar, backboard, and all.

So I stop her right there and walk to security around the corner and look at the security tape.

She very clearly looked around, made sure no one was looking, then gently laid down in a mangled position.

In the video, it looked like her son said, ‘Forget this,’ and he literally walks away and walks several miles home.

She was back two days later.”

She wasn’t even tensing or anything.

It was a really sad case though, she has a history of coming in saying she was pregnant when the urine and blood test was clearly negative.

In one case she even tried to steal a pregnant patient’s urine (she got caught pretty fast). She was on psych follow-up, not sure what the diagnosis was but my guess would have been Munchhausen’s.

My second patient was a man with a chronic cough. Asked him, ‘Are you smoking?’

And he says no. I examine him and there’s a pack of smokes right in his chest pocket.”

I ask her what happened; she says she slipped on a puddle and fell, hurting her back. I look all over the bathroom floor; there’s NO water on the floor.

I ask the manager AND the patient’s friends, ‘Do you see water on the floor?’

She says, ‘I’m lying on top of it.’

We’re going to have to roll her to her side in order to get a backboard under her and pick her up; I explain that to her.

As we roll her to her side, I check her back for any obvious injuries; I then check her clothing AND the floor she was lying on – nothing was wet.

‘Do you see water on the floor? Are her clothes wet?’ They all said no. We then roll the patient onto the board, pick her up, and place her on a stretcher.

At this point, I tell the patient, ‘I’m going to be writing up paperwork for this call and your treatment.

This is standard; I have to write up what I’m told in addition to what I see. What you need to understand is this – if you happen to decide to take Walmart to court, they can request a copy of my run report, and it’s going to show what you said and what I found.

That being said, do you want to keep dragging this out and go to the hospital, or do you want to just get up from my stretcher and be done with it?’

She chose to get up and leave.”

We arrived at the scene to this woman having ‘seizures’ but we could easily tell she wasn’t because she was making direct eye contact when we were talking to her and she was even responding to our questions while she was having one of her episodes.

We never come out and say they you are faking, but we do ask if you are pretending to have seizures and if you say no then we do our best to try to make you go to the hospital.

We had another call from the same address about 3 hours later for the same thing.

‘Female having seizures.’ So we arrive at the scene again kind of angry since she woke us up for having pretend seizures again.

This time she gets an attitude with us when we ask her if she was really having a seizure, and we weren’t having any of it.

My captain got on the radio and called to have a deputy come out and assist us with dealing with the crazy wasted lady.

So long story short, she was told she could either go with the deputy to jail or she could go with the ambulance.

She said that she would rather go with the ambulance.

The deputy said that we better take her to the hospital just to get checked out, so that is what we did, and she screamed and cursed at the paramedics all the way there.”

Patient: ‘Well…my head hurts, and my vision is blurry. Really, my limbs kinda feel like they’re on fire.’

Doctor: (In a tone that indicates he believes this patient as far as he can throw him) ‘Really.’

Patient: ‘Yeah. I was at (other local hospital’s) ER yesterday, and they said there’s nothing wrong with me, but I still feel like things are not right, so I thought I’d come here.’

Patient: ‘Opiates.’

Doctor: ‘Really. Are you sure you’re not substance-seeking?’ (It was 6 am. I had long reached the conclusion this doctor was bored with a quiet ER on a Sunday morning and was kind of messing with this guy.)

Patient: ‘Noooo! No, I just want to make sure that other hospital didn’t miss stuff. Maybe I need an EKG.

Doctor: (I can hear the rolling eyes through the curtain.) ‘See, you’re telling me all this stuff.

Can you understand why I think you’re totally substance-seeking and am not in the slightest bit inclined to give you opiates?’

Patient: ‘What about Percoset?’

Me: (Feeling like I’m dying from the meningitis headache and neck ache that hasn’t been diagnosed yet, so I haven’t been given any pain medications at all) snort with laughter…If he can’t have any opiates, can I?'”

We rush in and Navy Corpsman was sitting there holding his arm and wincing as he got hit by a truck.

He made up some vague story about pulling a muscle when the dummy fell or something.

For the next month or so this guy would walk around with his arm (right arm) held out bent at the elbow (L shaped) with his palm up and his hand frozen like a claw.

It was hilarious. One day he gave my buddy a ride in his car, and he used his good hand to put his clawed hand on the shift between the seats and used his good hand to pull that hand, so he could switch to D.

I’m laughing just thinking of my buddy laughing his butt off telling me this story over drinks later that night.

He eventually did get his medical discharge which meant he had another reason to buzz off because he had all sorts of appointments with the discharge people.

I always figured that if someone is in the military and wants out it’s better to give them the boot. Keep them in and all it does is mess up morale because all they do is sham and complain.

You get an older guy doing this, it puts bad thoughts into the younger/newer guys. So forget them. Get em’ outta’ here.

When you have a heart attack, your cardiac tissue releases these markers.

Kind of distress signal. We can pick these up on a blood test. Sometimes a heart attack can be seen on an EKG.

If a patient had a history of negative tests and/or multiple admissions and all their vitals were normal and I suspected they were faking it, I would ask them if it hurt when I put my hand on their chest.

I would suggest a warm compress and some Tylenol and their pain was always mysteriously gone within seconds of my announcing that it couldn’t possibly be related to your heart.

After a while, you do get very used to the signs and symptoms of people actually having a heart attack.

She kept talking about how her meds ran out and she needed more. She also started talking about how her whole family thought she was an addict, but she swore wasn’t.

I started feeling for her a little, she seemed nice, and like she was going through some mess.

She loved it so much that the prior weekend, she and her husband spent 14 hours at a festival.

She was tired from carrying chairs around and dancing. And they were traveling to go to another one, the day after her appointment.

It was a fantastic weekend,’ and then realized she gave herself up and got real quiet.”