Legends of Windemere

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I was watching a show, which was rather good.  The name was ‘Almost Paradise’ and it was a crime show with some comedy.  The main character goes to a tropical island because he suffers from high blood pressure.  This means he can’t continue being a DEA agent until he gets the condition under control.  You can figure out the rest, but I want to focus on the high blood pressure.

Now, I had and still have hypertension.  This is something that doesn’t have symptoms, but can still kill you.  In the show, the hero has a few episodes where his BP tracker goes off and he gets physical symptoms.  Fatigue, sweating, dizziness, and basically what you would expect from an anxiety disorder.  These two conditions can go hand-in-hand, but it felt like it was focusing on the hypertension as the culprit.  There was some talk of everything stemming from PTSD.  Yet, the show really pounded on the hypertension for the first season.  Not a bad thing since it made it unique.  Just kind of strange that it was being exaggerated.

This seems to be common in fiction too.  You take a condition and push it either to its real extreme or an exaggerated version.  I saw this done a lot with autism way back.  A child with autism would always be constantly screaming at the top of their lungs with no way to calm them down.  They’d get triggered by lights, sounds, and other environmental things as if they’re just a bomb waiting to go off.  Now, this can be possible, but it was used as the standard, which colored people’s opinion of autism.  For many, they wouldn’t believe a person had it unless they were like this.  So, you can see how exaggerations in fiction can be harmful here.

Is it inevitable though?  I think you can’t really avoid some exaggeration.  Authors introduce these conditions for flavor and need to make them count.  There has to be moments where they pose a problem, so you can’t have them be benign for the entire story.  Otherwise, readers won’t really care or believe.  This would be causing the opposite issue of downplaying.  An author could even downplay it to the point where they forget and have the character take actions they wouldn’t do.  For example, a person with asthma running after an enemy and never having breathing trouble.  Again, these are added to be part of the character, so they need to come up and that might require a small level of exaggeration.

An issue or cause for this could be lack of research.  Many times, we think we know about these conditions or do a surface search for information.  Get the general idea and off we go thinking we can utilize it.  Doesn’t always work out that way because there’s always some nuance, especially in health situations.  This is really true for the stuff we hear about all the time like hypertension, diabetes, asthma, insomnia, etc.  Commercials and stories use these so often that we think we know about them.  Yet, we could be falling for another author’s exaggerations.  Kind of like a cycle if you think about it.

I don’t know if I’ll ever try it.  Part of the reason is because fantasy brings up the question of ‘why they exist’.  A world like Windemere is high magic, so you’d thing asthma, allergies, and hypertension would be easily cured.  Can’t say I’d disagree with that.  Other ailments would arise like curses, which I will play around with.  Yet, the real world ones can be tricky.  If I did use one, I’d have an exaggeration issue because I’d start looking for reasons to bring it to the forefront.  I’d have to justify including it in the character and that could lead to overcompensation.

What do you think about the use of medical conditions in fiction and their exaggerations?