7 Health Conditions Soap Operas Taught Me
It’s no secret that healthcare in the US is abysmal. Medical or physical, there is so much information out there vital to the lives of ourselves and our loved ones that it’s really easy to slip through the cracks and end up blindsided by the diagnosis of a friend or relative. This might also be an issue of education, but there is only so much that a school can do. Wellness requires the constant education of the self and remaining current can sometimes take help from outside.
Growing up, I found Soaps more relatable than other types of shows because they got grief for simply being themselves. The reputation for melodrama, slow-moving plots, normalizing infidelity and murder, being more magic than realism was definitely earned. However, crime shows humanizing cops that solve cases at an unrealistically fast pace are some of the most popular shows around and use the same tropes, so I feel no shame in liking Soaps, and miss the steady moving plots that Daytime TV had to offer.
My favorite Daytime Soap was ABC’s One Life To Live. The plot was melodramatic enough to be a Soap but not as Fantastic or reliant on fitness models for their cast. The characters seemed like everyday people, more diverse than other Soaps I tried watching.
I watched One Life To Live in the summers when it was too hot to go outside and when I was sick and home at school. Instead of using vampires, evil twins, or rampant sex to tell their stories, OLTL often used illness storylines and medical conditions to further plots, enhance characters, and challenged actors to bring out their best.
While these health conditions were not always handled in a way that was 100% accurate and respectful, their inclusion in storylines raised awareness and served as a jumping off point to learn more about health.
Lupus
Before House, which had the ongoing joke of “it’s Lupus, it’s not lupus,” throughout its series run, One Life To Live introduced the disease head on into their plots.
In 1992, Megan Gordon, daughter of show star, Victoria Lord (and her many other last names) was diagnosed with the disease. Her roommate in the hospital was Marty Saybrooke, someone who would be part of the show on and off until the completion of the show. 1992 was way before my time of watching the show, but Vicki never let the memory of Megan fizzle out.
Vicki’s character was consistently shown lighting candles for Megan and supporting fundraisers that help those with Lupus, bringing an awareness to the issue in a way that was tasteful and classy. Lupus disproportionally kills women, especially women of color, so the awareness
Rhesus Disease
One of the most controversial baby’s in the show’s run was the spawn of Starr Manning and Cole Thornheart. This pairing was controversial not just because their families hated each other, they were also underage. As if this baby needed more trauma surrounding it’s birth, it was originally believed that the child, a girl named Hope was dead.
This is an instance in which medical knowledge helped put the pieces of a mystery together. The cause of death was Rhesus, also known asa RH disease, which can be managed if medical providers know about it. RH is a type of anemia that can affect the baby’s development in the womb if a mother is RH negative and a baby is RH positive.
Starr and Cole were both RH negative, and the condition rarely affects first pregnancies, so it was a real kick in the teeth for Starr to find this out about her lost baby. Eventually it was revealed that the baby was switched by one of Jessica Buchanan’s alter personalities (we’re getting to that one, promise) and Hope was able to join her family and be a literal symbol of hope for all of us.
Hepatitis C
Jessica Buchanan had a really, really rough go of it on the show. She found out as an adult that she had hepatitis because one of her alter personalities (we’re getting there) used drugs and had unprotected sex with all sorts of people. The condition caused Jessica to transmit the disease to at least one partner and the character experienced several flareups after her diagnosis, almost experiencing liver failure at least once.
With better treatment for this medical condition available, it makes me wish the show was around to give some closure to a character that has been put through way too much. This storyline helped me see the reality of sexually transmitted infections and long lasting effects. It was refreshing to see that outside of the typical context, which is normally gay men being affected by HIV, which we already have in a lot of contexts already.
Cerebrovascular Accidents
Watching One Life To Live, I knew what a stroke was, but I did not know how much if affected the human body. Hilary B. Smith played Nora Hanen (Gannon, Buchanan, Colson, Buchanan, depending on the year) for 20 years.
Her most captivating storyline occurred in 2006, when supervillain Spencer Truman put Nora in a coma. Hilary B. Smith’s contract was up, but after a long 6 months, Nora awoke but in a different state. Nora had suffered a stroke.
Viewers spent the next few months watching Nora in her recovery. There was physical therapy, difficulty speaking, wheelchair use to get around, eventually getting back to work. Smith’s research and acting skills did a lot of work in showing an audience what survivors of cerebrovascular accidents go through everyday. Representation matters.
Leukemia
The OLTL staff was downright cruel to the Morasco family. After getting over a, “who’s the daddy” storyline over the parentage of Shane Morasco, he was diagnosed with leukemia. Thankfully, he had the support of his parents, Rex and Gigi, to get him through treatments.
However, his evil aunt, Stacy Morasco, lied about being a match for Shane’s bone marrow transplant because she wanted to steal Rex from Gigi for some reason. Being on a waiting list for any type of treatment is a form of hell. Shane would have died unless his family could find a match. The Stacy nonsense made for a nerve-wrecking yet informative storyline.
Nearly a third of childhood cancer is a form of leukemia, so seeing this storyline really mattered.
DID: Dissociative Identity Disorder
Growing up in the 1990s, with Prozac and Zoloft lurking behind nearly every corner, there was so much misinformation about mental health and what to call issues and disorders of one’s mind.
Terms like bipolar and schizophrenia were used like synonyms, not just to describe each other but also to describe unrelated issues. Whether one meant borderline personality disorder, split personality disorder, manic, or crazy, it was almost always bipolar or schizophrenic.
One Life To Live brought the proper term to their longest-running storyline. Vicki, the show’s main character, suffered from DID, dissociative identity disorder. This meant that the character had alter personalities. Niki appeared when Vicki needed her, same with Jean Randolph, King, and other personalities she developed in decades of acting excellence.
Vicki’s daughter, Jessica, also suffered from DID. Jessica had Tess and Bess, who both formed due to trauma and caused a lot more of it. Both Vicki and Jess went through numerous treatments, such as psychotherapy, hypnosis, and integration therapy.
The Undiagnosable
With so much in the mental field that is unknown, Soaps are a great venue to watch and wonder just WHY one does what they do. Why steal a baby? Why cheat on your spouse? Why fake a condition like illness of pregnancy? Why pretend to be your (evil) twin? Why do you keep secrets?
So much of the human condition is unknown. As participants in the human experience, there can be an urge to label certain behaviors that one feels are downright abnormal. Doing so in an uninformed manner can be just as lethal as some of these soap villains. There is so much to learn, and when what we consume educates us, we’re all the better for it.
Was there an obscure medical condition you learned about from you? Feel free to comment below.
