What to do when the attention getting behavior is medical in nature?

[tm006f]

My husband is BPD.  Yesterday he was complaining to me all day that he felt sick, yet he wouldn't come home from work early or go to the doctor (my suggestions). 

I asked if there was anything I could do and he said no.

Finally he asked me to pick him up from the train, which I went to do, but it took me a few minutes longer than he wanted, because we have a baby and it takes time to get out of the house and he only told me to pick him up when he was one station away.

When I got there he was so livid, he had already started walking home and refused to get into the car.  He told me to just drive back home and "act normal".  So that's what I did.

However, when he got home, he was literally wailing ("ahhhh, ahhh" as if he were about to die and huffing and puffing like he had just run a marathon.  This went on for 15 minutes.  Then he read me the riot act about how I don't know how to take care of anyone and in 12 years I have never, ever done anything to help him when he is sick.

I told him I made him chicken soup and he brushed it off. 

I left and went to put the baby to bed.  He said he was going to sleep on the couch, so I said I wasn't coming back down.

After the baby was asleep, he started messaging me on the phone (how dare I not help him? how can I sleep when he is in so much distress? etc.).  I went back downstairs and he again verbally assaulted me for not knowing what to do when he is sick.  From my background, when I get sick, the normal response is to say to him things like "hey, can you go to the pharmacy and get me this medicine" or whatever else it is that I need.  I don't flip out and scream at him for being incompetent; I just tell him what I need.  He, on the other hand, expects me to read his mind and know exactly what he wants every second.

So then he went into bossy mode and started ordering me around ("get me the thermometer, get me ibuprofen, put a cold cloth on my neck", etc.).  At each pass he would yell at me about how I was doing everything incorrectly ("hurry up! why are you so slow?".

He would repeatedly take his temperature (every few minutes).  It was barely above 99 degrees.  He had no other symptoms at all.  Despite this, he kept repeating that if his temperature got above 100 degrees, I would need to take him to the emergency room.  He had me contact someone to ask if she could watch the baby while we were at the ER if needed.

Finally he just went to sleep. 

Now he is "home sick".  I work from home, which means I will have the pleasure of taking care of his imaginary symptoms all day.

I know that if someone is dysregulating, that it can be best to just walk away to end the argument.

What do you do if their anxiety is focused around illness?  My husband is definitely a hypochondriac and I understand that from his point of view he feels a great deal of stress and anxiety and even the slightest symptoms is magnified a hundred times for him, so even though he appears fine from the outside, he is in a great deal of stress, which sucks for him, but it also sucks for me because he is so awful at managing his stress and he just dumps it all on me.

So what do you do?  I feel like I can't walk away when he is claiming he is sick.

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[goateeki]

I think that the first response is the right one. Something along the lines of "Would you like me to make an appointment with the doctor." Well defined limits. You're his wife, not his mother.

I feel bad for you.