Dorothy Zbornak Is One Badass Babe

It seems like life is getting a lot harder to manage. Our job stresses us out, or we’re stressed because we don’t have a job.

We don’t have a steady income but have a lot of bills to pay. Most days it seems too much to handle.

I struggle with a lot of health problems along with being a chronic pain sufferer.

I’ve been dealing with chronic pain for about fourteen years now, but it has gotten worse after going through septic shock in 2016.

As most people know, my favorite TV show is The Golden Girls. I have every season on DVD, and I can reference almost anything that is happening in my life to one of the show’s episodes.

Sick and Tired.

In season 5, episode 1 and 2 titled Sick and Tired, Dorothy has been sick for five months.

She meets with one doctor after another, and none of them seem to be able to figure out what’s wrong.

I know firsthand how frustrating it is, not knowing the reason why you’re sick. Almost every blood test I get comes back inconclusive.

It’s not like I want to have all these illnesses, I want a reason for why I’m always sick and in pain. I want an answer.

Later, in the show, Dorothy meets with Dr. Budd, a Neurologist who doesn’t believe that she’s sick.

He tells her that she’s not ill because she’s able to walk when his patients can’t walk and can’t breathe.

He also doesn’t believe that she’s sick since all her test results were normal or inconclusive, then proceeds to dismiss her while telling her to go to a hairdresser.

He suggests that she should change her hair color because his wife just became a blonde, and she’s a new woman.

After that, she meets with a new doctor who diagnoses her with Chronic Fatigue Syndrome.

Dr. Chang explains that new diseases are rising every day, and some doctors have a hard time believing they exist because they can’t see it under their microscopes just yet.

“Just because someone in the medical field wears white, doesn’t mean that they’re angels.” — Dorothy Zbornak

You would think doctors wouldn’t talk to their patients the way Dr. Budd spoke to Dorothy, but they do.

I hear the kind of things they say to pain patients from the people in my chronic pain support group all the time.

And believe me, some doctors are downright cruel to their patients.

Some doctors want to suggest to a person that they wouldn’t be in pain if they would lose weight.

Or if we even bring up the option of possibly getting something stronger than Tylenol or Ibuprofen, we get labeled as a drug addict looking for a fix.

At the end of episode 2 of Sick and Tired, Dorothy takes the ladies out to a nice elegant dinner to celebrate Dorothy being diagnosed with a debilitating disease and for the fact that it even has a name.

She expresses how good it feels to know that she is sick and not sick and crazy, like some of the other doctors thought.

When champagne is being poured, she sees the doctor who dismissed her claim of being sick. While also telling her to go to a hairdresser.

She calmly confronts the doctor, telling him that she is, in fact, sick, with an actual illness and rips him a new one for the way he treated her.

“I don’t know where you doctors lose your humanity, but you lose it. You know, if all of you at the beginning of your career could get very sick and very scared for a while, you’d probably learn more from that than from anything else. You better start listening to your patients. They need to be heard. They need caring. They need compassion. They need attending. You know, someday doctor Budd, you’re going to be on the other side of the table, and as angry as I am and as ANGRY as I always will be, I still wish you a better doctor than you were to me. “

I know a lot of people from my chronic pain support group wish they could say this to some of their doctors.

It’s a horrible feeling when our doctor treats us like we’re not sick, and it’s all in our heads.

Our pain is not in our heads, our suffering is genuine, and it’s not going away. When will people realize that people like me are in constant agony?

We live our lives in pain. Every second of every day of the week, we are in pain.

I understand that it’s hard for people who are not in our shoes to understand just how bad it is, so they don’t know how to react.

I understand that, I truly do. Unfortunately, people who don’t know how to respond end up saying some of the most insensitive things to chronic pain patients.

You don't have to look sick to be sick.

They think telling us we don’t look sick is a compliment, and we should be happy about that when that is a harsh statement to make.

We might not look sick, but that doesn’t mean we’re not sick since there are a lot of chronic illnesses that you are not able to see outside the body.

They are known as an Invisible Illness. Meaning, the illness doesn’t show itself on the outside of the patient’s body as chickenpox would.

A lot of autoimmune diseases are invisible and some of them only show outside of the body when the patient is experiencing a flare.

Like all pain patients, I have my good days and my bad days. I am still in pain even on a day I consider to be a good day.

I don’t need to have a pain flare-up every day to be in pain. That is something a lot of people fail to understand.

They don’t see the illness, so they don’t know how someone who doesn’t “look” sick can have a disease that causes them to be in constant pain.

Because of how society treats pain sufferers, we constantly have to explain ourselves and jump through hoops to get the proper care we deserve since doctors and nurses don’t believe we’re in pain because we don’t look sick.

All we want is to be heard and understood. We don’t want all these wacko pills to get high.

We want relief from our daily pain so we can experience some form of a normal life.

All we do is lay in bed because our pain is so bad, that’s all we can do. That doesn’t make us lazy. We’re just trying to cope the best we can while being in constant pain.

Just like Dorothy said, we need caring, and we need compassion.

Just because we have an illness that other people have trouble understanding doesn’t give them the right to criticize us, and it doesn’t mean we deserve all the judgment that ignorant people place upon us.

Dorothy Zbornak is a badass who defended the chronic Illness and chronic pain community very well.

Doctors need to have more compassion and understanding of their patients — especially doctors who specialize in Pain Management.

Don’t tell my mother and I that we need to start looking for the cause of my pain since all we’re doing at the pain clinic is treating the symptom, we need to start treating the source that’s causing all of my pain.

Don’t tell us to do something that we have been doing for years.

I’ve been passed to specialist after specialist in hopes of finding the reason why I’m in pain every second of every day.

While meeting with all these specialists, I still need help managing my pain while I’m out looking for the cause of my pain.

I can’t just go through life in pain without any help until I find the reason why I’m in agony.

I can’t search for the source of my pain without any help to treat the pain I’m experiencing; I still need pain management from the pain clinic.

You don’t truly understand what it’s like living with chronic pain until you’ve experienced it yourself.

And I’m not talking about the pain you get from menstrual cramps, or body aches from having the flu.

I’m talking about the chronic migraines some sufferers get that last all day and sometimes every day.

The body aches from our systemic inflammation, our Rheumatoid Arthritis, Ankylosing Spondylitis, Fibromyalgia, Lupus, and many more.

These illnesses cause us to be in pain every second of every day of the week. We don’t get relief from our pain or illness, but on a rare occasion when we do feel relief, it only lasts for about an hour at most.

It just blows my mind how rude and heartless some people are.

If they would stop and take the time to recognize that our chronic pain is, in fact, a debilitating disability, then maybe they would have a better time understanding the roadblocks we face in life.

Dorothy Zbornak is a badass because she stood up for herself, and she didn’t sit back and let all of these doctors dismiss her as some crazy person.

She didn’t give up looking for an answer as to why she’s been sick for five months.

She defended herself while putting her doctor in check by serving him up some knowledge.

By doing so, she defended everyone who suffers from chronic pain and chronic illness.

She defended everyone who has ever been dismissed by their doctor and not believed. She truly is one badass babe.