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Sick and Tired
Jodie Noel Vinson
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Like many during the pandemic lockdown, my husband Marc and I watched and re-watched shows from our couch. Unlike most, our quarantine stretched well beyond March 2020. We had what is now known as Long Covid, a post-viral response we would struggle with for the next four years. After months of symptoms, we began taking cautious walks around the block, but each venture landed us back on the couch. Fatigue blanketed us like a weighted duvet; we could barely stand long enough to take a shower. My lungs ached, and my heart raced even when I was sitting calmly, watching the next episode of The Golden Girls.
We’d turned to the lighthearted series to distract ourselves from the dark thoughts that threatened in the evening, when the interminable illness was at its worst. I remembered the sitcom, and its catchy theme song, from commercials that aired on NBC throughout my childhood: And if you threw a party, invited everyone you knew, you would see the biggest gift would be from me. I had vague memories of the four women co-stars: Rue McClanahan (Blanche), Betty White (Rose), Estelle Getty (Sophia), and Beatrice Arthur (Dorothy), outfitted in long, brightly colored dresses so shapeless they sometimes looked like bathrobes, and often were bathrobes.
At the time, I’d been wearing my bathrobe a lot, and the show’s simple repetitions seemed to fit with my recurring lifestyle, which was increasingly confined to the couch. The sitcom, which ran for seven seasons (1985-1992), follows three single women in their fifties who begin a new stage of life together in Miami, along with Sophia, Dorothy’s mother. Several episodes in, we were able to predict the show’s rhythms and one-liners: Sophia’s zingers as she exited stage left, Dorothy’s dry wit, Rose’s rambling stories, Blanche’s innuendos. But as season four ran into season five, we noticed a shift in tone. The show began to take on social issues, episodes dedicated to topics like addiction and artificial insemination.
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One evening, a special double feature: Dorothy, we learned, had been sick—some sort of flu—and, just as she began to recover, got sick again. She begins wearing her bathrobe more often than usual, even when the other three are fully clothed in monochrome dress suits of magenta, teal, and mustard yellow, in dusters that flow off shoulder pads like capes, in bulky costume jewelry and earrings that dangle from perfectly coifed hair. In the opening scene, Dorothy, who rarely slouches, sits slumped among them at the kitchen table. She complains of overwhelming fatigue, heart palpitations, of being too tired to talk, or lift her arms in the shower.
My eyes pricked with sympathy. I glanced at Marc. We’d both cried when Josh Lyman got shot in The West Wing, and during Gilmore Girls, when Luke and Lorelei finally kiss. Neither of us had ever cried at The Golden Girls.
In the next scene, Dorothy sits on an exam table, clutching a blue hospital gown closed at her neck. Even when seated, she retains some of her five-foot-ten elegance, and she’s doing her best to hold on to dignity. Every now and then she uses her free hand to gesture at the doctor, to make a point, to make up the imbalance in the power dynamic. The doctor stands over her in his lab coat, hands tucked noncommittally into the pockets of his khaki pants. Dorothy’s tests were all normal; he refuses to believe she is sick. From stage right, spritely Sophia bustles in to the exam room to testify to her daughter’s illness, ever-present handbag at her elbow. The physician doesn’t listen.
Dorothy sees a lot of doctors through the first episode of the two-part plot, each more dismissive than the last. Even worse is the way they explain her symptoms to Dorothy—as something she has imagined, or as a consequence of some personal failure. “I get tired too,” one says, “It’s called getting old.” And another: “How’s your social life; do you see men?”
“There’s nothing wrong with you, Dorothy,” Dr. Budd, the specialist she travels to New York to see, chastises. He leans towards her over the desk in suit and tie, a faux leather chair creaking beneath his weight. The city beyond the windows of the his skyrise office seems to dwarf his patient, who appears to shrink in stature after each encounter with a medical professional. “Have you ever thought about seeing a psychiatrist?”
“That’s what happened to me!” I turned to Marc as To Be Continued… flashed across the screen. He’d seen me come home from each appointment, crumpled in despair after being told by one specialist after another that my symptoms were all in my head. Because of safety restrictions during the health crisis, I couldn’t have a Sophia by my side in the exam rooms where doctors wrote me off with prescriptions for anxiety meds. Now, to have someone witness on screen the humiliation I’d experienced under their withering stares felt almost healing.
The show takes its time in resolving the issue. For Dorothy, usually so strong and sure, there is self-doubt; she begins to feel she is going mad. For once, Rose’s tendency to take things at face value is a virtue: she never doubts her friend is sick. For Sophia, there is fear: her daughter might have an unknown disease that could cause real harm.
“We’ve seen a perfectly healthy energetic woman waste away,” she tells Blanche and Rose over salad in the kitchen, where they often share a late-night cheesecake. Behind them, the polished wood cupboards glow against butter-colored wallpaper. “So what difference does it make that they don’t have a name for it yet…You think they had a name for the Black Plague when one guy had it? Thousands had to die before they knew what it was.”
These were fears I’d lived with for months. We were in a pandemic. The long-term effects of the coronavirus were as yet unknown. Each time pain fired in my chest, my stomach dropped the way it does when you slip on ice, letting me know something was wrong. But whenever I explained my symptoms to a physician, I was disbelieved, because the pain couldn’t be seen. I was assigned therapists who assumed, like the doctors, that my symptoms were psychosomatic, that my elevated pulse was caused by anxiety, and that if I’d only think positively, I would get better. Even with my husband’s condition mirroring my own, I began to doubt myself. Through those months, Marc became my Rose, assuring me what we felt was real.
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As the theme song fades into the opening scene of episode two—your heart is true, you’re a pal and a confidant—the camera pans over shelves of children’s toys before centering Dorothy. Her frame is hunched at a knee-high blue table in a pediatrician’s office, where she is pounding a fistful of Play-do in frustration. She’s come to see the doctor there, a long-time friend, who, owing to their prior relationship, believes she is sick. The pediatrician recommends a specialist who is finally able to diagnose Dorothy’s mysterious ailment as chronic fatigue syndrome. “It has a name! I am thrilled,” Dorothy rejoices, and the four friends go out to dinner to celebrate.
The restaurant’s dining room is filled with formal round tables covered in white cloth overlaid with pink. Beneath the chandeliers, the women are dressed in their finest: Blanche in baby blue, Sophia and Rose in a light mauve that matches the tablecloth, and Dorothy wears a stylish white jacket with a high, quilted collar and heavy gold earrings. She suggests champagne to celebrate, and Sophia cheers: “My daughter found out she has a debilitating disease!” The irony was not lost on me, but neither was the jubilation.
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Across the restaurant, Dorothy spies one of her doctors. “Don’t make a scene!” Blanche warns, laying on her Southern accent. “Order without me,” Dorothy replies, rising. As I watched the sick woman march past the other diners to the doctor’s table, I felt apprehensive. I’d never been able to express what I wanted to say to my doctors: the power had always been in their hands as the experts, and I’d cowered in the face of their skepticism.
When a cardiologist insinuated I was imagining nine months of pain and fatigue, all I could do was cry, written off again by someone I’d gone to for help. “Even my husband comes home with a headache and thinks it’s the virus—everyone’s paranoid,” that doctor told me, dismissing my racing heart rate as “dehydration.” The tears she provoked became her proof that my emotions caused my symptoms. Her supervisor came in to mediate, promising more tests to placate me. But his charge couldn’t let it go. “See a psychiatrist,” she hissed, insistent on the last word.
Golden Girls lets Dorothy have the final word. In the restaurant, towering over the man and his half-eaten meal, she tells off the doctor in what scriptwriter Susan Harris—who had been ill-treated by doctors when suffering from an adrenal issue—has called her “revenge script.” “I don’t know where you doctors lose your humanity, but you lose it,” Dorothy berates Dr. Budd, as his wife looks on with seeming relish. Pulling a seat up to his table, Dorothy goes on to fulfill the invisibly sick patient’s fantasy: “If all of you at the beginning of your careers could get very sick and very scared for a while, you’d probably learn more from that than anything else.”
At some point during those harrowing months with no answers, I’d come across an article by a doctor who contracted the virus himself, and experienced its long-lasting effects, none of which showed up on tests. “The Lack of Objective Data Does Not Preclude Illness,” one of his headers declared. Because Covid-19 did not discriminate, infecting medical professionals like everyone else, more attention has been called to the lasting post-viral response the infection can cause, legitimizing the experience of those with invisible, ongoing symptoms.
The Golden Girls Season Five, Episodes One and Two, “Sick and Tired,” aired in 1989. Back then, Dorothy’s condition was only beginning to be studied. Yet three decades later, patients still encounter the same dismissal portrayed by Bea Arthur in her bathrobe. “I can’t tell you what a relief it is to just be sick, not sick and crazy,” Dorothy tells her friends as she rejoins them at their table for a triumphant toast. I often thought, through my own illness, that I could have borne its long consequence on my body if only I’d had the succor of being believed. Instead, I derived this comfort from a rare reflection of chronic illness in eighties pop culture, when the Golden Girls became my pals and my confidants, and it felt like the biggest gift.
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Jodie Noel Vinson holds an MFA in nonfiction from Emerson College. Her work has been published in The New York Times, New England Review, Literary Hub, The Iowa Review, and Ploughshares, among other places. She is the recipient of the Ninth Letter Literary Award in Creative Nonfiction, the Arts & Letters Susan Atefat Prize for Creative Nonfiction, the New Ohio Review Literary Award in Nonfiction, the Maureen Egen Writers Exchange Award from Poets & Writers, and a residency from Jentel Foundation. Jodie lives in Providence, where she is writing a book about the intersections of chronic illness and creative expression.
