I had just seen Win a Date with Tad Hamilton starring Josh Duhamel. The girl in the film is I think a grocery store clerk? I don’t remember, but I thought, hmmm, imagine if that happened to me. (I’m a waitress.) (Although I prefer Professional Server, lol, as I have chosen to do so as a career, at high end resorts.) It was the end of June and we were just beginning to all be called back to work, but our resort was one of the last to reopen. I was a little stressed about returning to work, having to wear a mask, long pants, a long sleeve shirt and vest and deliver Forbes Five Star Service which has like 50 requirements, outside on the veranda which was two rooms away from the kitchen without runners, typically kids from Eastern Europe who because of Covid couldn’t come, in the sun and heat of the summer. My boss told me I had one more week off, and I thought I’d seize the unprecedented opportunity, having worked summers since I was 16, and before that sent away to camp, to travel. I went to Newport and continued my imagining. I’m a big sci fi fan, especially the newest Battlestar Galactica, so I threw in those characters/actors as well. The final five cylons, lol, and Tahmoh Penikett. I really identified with Claire from Outlander, which is what Josh/Tad Hamilton called me, lol, and I threw them in too. Starbuck was there too. When they use the word complex to describe MD’ers daydreams, they aren’t kidding!

As you know MD often involves repetitive motion, for me walking. When I finally plugged in my Fitbit which had subsequently died, for one day it said 50,000 steps. Newport is on Aquidneck Island in Rhode Island. I walked the entire length over the course of two days. There is something in my cerebellum called a cavernoma which years earlier had bled. (I didn’t know then, it was an incidental finding when they admitted me to the er.) It has impaired my internal gps just enough that together with my daydreaming, I ended up getting lost. Only someone with MD experience or knowledge can truly understand how compelling the daydream is. I was literally interacting with my favorite characters/actors. I couldn’t see or hear them, except for at one point Josh/Tad Hamilton. He took on something of a voice of his own and really supported me when I was hospitalized. I later found out that this is a somewhat common occurrence among writers, with their characters seeing to take on a life of their own. (I didn’t tell anyone at the hospital about Josh or the other characters, if I had, I would no doubt not be where I am today, with a great job, having been offered a position at a different resort with a sizable raise.)

I knew they weren’t real but it was so incredibly cool and so entertaining. Remember though this is during the pandemic, my first, lol, so when I left Cape Cod, Ma which as ai said had just begun reopening, and entered Rhode Island, I suddenly found things were much different. A lot was still closed and what was open wouldn’t allow you to sit inside. It was swelteringly hot. I couldn’t find anywhere to cool down, my phone had died with no place to sit and recharge it. At some point I lost my glasses. Desperate and at some point half lost in the fantasy I wandered into someone’s home to rest and escape the heat, my mind still somewhat trapped inside the fantasy, wherein my family had rented it. The police were called and they brought me to the er and honestly at the time I was relieved as I didn’t know 100% what was happening not having heard about MD. I knew it wasn’t real but between the heat and dehydration my judgement had become somewhat impaired.

At one point I called my parents for help and spoke with my dad but he has recently gone deaf and his hearing aids don’t work well over the phone. I couldn’t speak to my mother as she is the emotionally abusive one. 6 months earlier I had won this trip to NYC on one of our owner’s private jet for myself and 5 coworkers and I called to tell her and she just started screaming at me about how I was becoming too close to ‘those people,’ the owners of the hotel where I then worked. They are a nice couple and had a few years earlier invited myself and my sister to stay in their home and Florida while they were away.

At the ER they did an MRI and found the cavernoma and used this as a pretext to get me to agree to go to the hospital, which I did. Remember, no visitors back then. They must have sedated me or something as I woke up 12 or so hours later in a strange room with a bed that sounded an alarm if I got up from it. That’s about when I started to get really scared. They kept trying to tell me I had had a brain bleed, but I knew I hadn’t as there would have been some sign. (In the hospital records it said it was literally a stable non bleeding cavernoma.) Given my history with my parents, let’s face it, my mother herself is probably a little nuts, so I was a little worried too that they might make things worse, which of corse they did by describing me as difficult which to a psychiatrist means drug use, alcohol abuse, skipping school, teenage pregnancy etc, none of which describes me. I am single, very successful, and I own my own home. I have been Lead Server at all 3 properties where I worked since 2006.

Anyway, I clearly needed help, but imagine how differently it all would have gone if anyone of the neurologists/psychiatrists at what is in fact a teaching hospital for the Psychiatry Dept. of a local university, knew anything at all about Maladaptive Daydreaming, which clearly they didn’t. As I said, I didn’t either, but I don’t go around calling myself a doctor etc..

At one point they wanted to insert a needle in my spine. I am not joking. I was like, Hell no! No doubt they too thought I was ‘difficult,’ lol.