Terry Prone: DJ Carey didn’t have Munchausen's, he wasn’t deluded, he was just a crook

When a former client pretended to have cancer to gain attention, she didn't cost Terry Prone anything other than her time

DJ Carey had an acute awareness of his targets and it was a good hearted gullibility that impoverished his victims. File picture: Collins Courts

The pretence was as detailed as was DJ Carey’s. Sustained over a long time. Convincing. 

But it wasn’t done to get money out of anyone. The currency sought was quite different.

The person at the centre of the story was an English client, a doctor working in a research institution for which my company, a couple of decades back, did some training. 

They asked me to help this doctor, so she could be promoted, which was their wish. And hers. 

The problem was that their feedback system suggested she had grievous communication problems and if those problems were not measurably resolved she would not be promoted. 

They would invest in six months of development work for her, so, every few weeks, I would fly to the airport nearest their HQ and spend a day with her.

She didn’t meet your eyes. She considered the simplest question for longer than made any sense. She talked comfortably about processes, never about people. 

She understood the strangeness of these behaviours but diagnostic processes had not found that she experienced either autism or ADHD

Although she was willing, even eager, to talk about her family background, that had to be avoided.

Solving her back story would have required therapy, rather than training, and so was not going to happen. 

Instead, we identified the specific behaviours that were off-putting to colleagues and superiors and rehearsed — endlessly rehearsed — the normal version of the strange things she did. 

One by one, the skills were developed and tried out in the workplace.

Feedback began. People said it to her face: “Hey, what’s happened to you? You’re much easier to deal with than you used to be.” She told them the truth, which added to the initial reactions. 

But people are always more interested in themselves and their tasks than they are in a colleague, so, over time, her gradual progress was filed under “fair dues” and mostly ignored. 

Assessments, however, showed the desired improvement, she was promoted and I stopped travelling to the north of England.

A couple of months after the conclusion of the training, she contacted me, asking if she could personally pay for a session and come to my office. Sure.

About five minutes into the meeting, she told me that she was suffering from an inoperable cancer and had started chemo, which had caused her to lose weight

The weight loss was obvious — she looked to be seven or eight kilogrammes lighter than the last time we’d met. 

She had not told her employer. Why not? Because her promotion meant so much to her and she couldn’t cope with people pivoting from their new respect to sympathy and concern.

Because she was a prominent medic, she knew leading oncologists specialising in her illness and would be able to get private treatment at weekends and during holidays. Nobody but me would ever know.

Why me? Because I wasn’t involved in her daily life and she could trust me not to go behind her back and tell her boss. 

She just needed someone to share details with. She wouldn’t telephone — just fax and come to my office infrequently. 

She would be well able to afford my fees. Of course, I said that no fees would be involved.

Her chemo was changed after a few weeks because it was causing a grievous side effect which she described in grim detail in a fax. 

Instead, the oncologist put her on an innovative combination of drugs new to the scene

She forwarded the relatively sparse studies of the combo.  

The only disadvantage to it was that it required weekend infusions which in turn necessitated the insertion of a portal in her neck. 

On her next visit, the protective adhesive covering the portal was now and then visible, although she had developed the habit of pulling her shirt over, so it was hidden, most of the time. 

Just in case any of her colleagues ever noticed it, she told me, she had let them know that it covered where a basal cell skin cancer had been snipped off. 

No bother — would just take time to heal.

She talked of dying but without fear. 

Her oncologist friends believed they could turn “lethal” into “chronic”, but if they failed, that would take time and she was going to use the intervening period to do breakthrough work back at HQ. 

She had worked with a lawyer — not the company lawyer, for obvious reasons — on a power of attorney which would keep her in charge of her own life as the cancer progressed

Despite the best efforts of the team treating her, the cancer metastasised, turning up, among other places, in her pancreas. 

By coincidence, I happened to have a training session with a cancer surgeon and use the details she had given me — without, of course, identifying her in any way — in the simulated oral test I was doing with him. 

What startled me was his dismissal. “Malingering or factitious disorder,” he said, and explained that cancer didn’t behave the way I was suggesting was the case in the fictional patient.

This was at the end of 18 months of constant reported suffering and fascinating reports of breakthrough treatments. 

When I got home, that night, I read through a crate full of faxes and slowly understood that the doctor had never had cancer. 

She was faking it. Not for money. Not to get out of work. 

She was doing what she was doing to get attention from just one person. Me

Looking at the photograph of a smirking DJ Carey with a telephone charger up his nose to give the impression of treatment in progress, I was reminded of what this doctor did to convince me that she was undergoing treatment. 

The slightly unusual cover on the portal she claimed was affixed to her neck: It wasn’t an Elastoplast. It had the look of a post-operative lesion-protector.

The weight loss was real and severe. She was prepared to starve herself to look like a chemo patient.

I researched Munchausen's, the condition identified in the 1950s and named after an 18th-century German aristocrat and compulsive liar.

Dr Marc Feldman, a current expert, says “the person is after emotional gratification; attention, sympathy, care, support that they feel unable to get in any other way”.

This isn’t Munchausen-by-proxy. That’s where parents — usually, sadly, the mother — torture and endanger their children to get the attention and approval of the medical teams treating the youngsters.

This does no harm to any third party — although in some cases, it grievously wastes the time of medical professionals.

DJ Carey didn’t have Munchausen's. He wasn’t deluded. He was just a crook. But he shared with my client an acute awareness of their targets. 

A good-hearted gullibility impoverished Carey’s victims. I sustained no damage other than wasted time.

I told the doctor I was on to her and that no further contact would happen between us. None ever did.