Doctors at Toronto’s Tademard Medical Research Clinic are baffled by a young woman’s incredibly absurd medical condition. “We’ve never seen anything like it,” says Dr. Jarvis Bonsecour. “She keeps slamming her face into her boyfriend’s fist over and over again. It doesn’t matter where she is, or what they’re doing, sooner or later, her face will contact his fist. Repeatedly.”

The young woman was referred to the clinic after she ran her car into the police station where her boyfriend was being held on domestic assault charges. “She drove her car right through the front of the station and into the holding cell where we had placed her boyfriend,” says Sgt. Paul Vrai of the Toronto Special Victims Unit. “She then jumped out of the car and started repeatedly slamming her face into his fist. Actually, that’s not quite accurate. His hands weren’t in a fist when she jumped out of the car — she grabbed his open hand, closed it and made it into a fist, and then slammed her face into it over and over again. When several of our officers saw that, we knew we weren’t dealing with a normal case of domestic violence. This woman clearly needed help.”

Doctors still aren’t sure why the woman feels compelled to slam her face into her boyfriend's fist. “It’s a mystery,” says Dr. Bonsecours. “We have to keep her tied to her bed, otherwise she’ll steal a car, hunt her boyfriend down, and start violently shoving her face into his fist. He could be at work, he could in the washroom, he could be on a rollercoaster, it doesn’t matter where he is. She’ll find him and she'll turn her beautiful face into a patchwork of bruises using his hands."

Dr. Bonsecours hopes that the woman will learn that physically harming herself with her boyfriend’s fist is unhealthy. “We’ve put her on a gluten free diet, which we think will really help with her self-destructive impulses. If that doesn’t work, the next step is to put her through a rigorous round of Freudian psychoanalysis. Finally, if we don’t see any improvement through gluten therapy or psychoanalysis, we’ll bring in an accredited priest who will perform a medical exorcism. The last option requires state of the art prayer beads and state regulated holy water. It’s very intense so we try to avoid it, but sometimes nothing else seems to work.”

Sgt. Paul Vrai hopes that the young woman is successful in her treatment. "Everyone should treat themselves with love and dignity," says Sgt. Vrai. "It's just terrible when young people feel the need to hurt themselves like that."