Post created by Josh and Tayler
The story of Gypsy Rose Blanchard and Dee Dee Blanchard is a story that has shocked many people across the country with the release of the Hulu series, “The Act”. For those of you unfamiliar with the story. Gypsy Rose Blanchard was only a young girl when her mother Dee Dee had convinced her and different physicians that Gypsy was experiencing symptoms that were not actually occurring. This led to Gypsy being prescribed medications that she did not need, along with undergoing surgeries such as having a feeding tube put in and having her salivary glands removed. Dee Dee even convinced Gypsy that she was not able to walk and was allergic to sugar, along with telling her that she had cancer. If there were any healthcare professionals that did not agree or tried to contest what Dee Dee was saying, she would stop seeing them. Professionals believe that Dee Dee had some sort of psychological disease that created a need for her to be a caregiver and ultimately put Gypsy in danger just to make herself feel adequate. Beyond the fact that there were obvious psychological problems with Dee Dee Blanchard, Gypsy was not being protected. All of these things contributed to putting Gypsy at a disservice that put her health in danger.
In this introductory episode of “The Act”, Gypsy and her mother move to a new town to start over, however, the danger of the health issues that Gypsy supposedly have still remain the same. In this episode we see many of the first deliberate, shady actions of Dee Dee. However, Joshua and I are only going to focus on a couple of them.
In the first 10 minutes of the episode, Dee Dee is giving Gypsy a bunch of meds that she has to crush and administer to her through her feeding tube. Mixing medication could be dangerous in itself but we want to take a quicker look at the feeding tube. When Gypsy was younger, Dee Dee had a feeding tube put in to Gypsy's stomach. With what we have learned about digestion, this means that Gypsy was not ingesting the food nor swallowing it by having the bolus travel through the esophagus into her stomach via peristaltic contractions of the smooth muscle. With the feeding tube, the food would go directly into her stomach, through the pyloric sphincter, through her small and large intestine, and excreted out. Due to her food traveling through the small and large intestine, she was still able to absorb the nutrients and medication, but it was made clear in the show that she still had to take nutrient supplements. Gypsy was being denied nutrients that she needed.
Adding to the plot, Dee Dee had Gypsy undergo a surgery that removed her salivary glands. Although Gypsy was not ingesting food orally, salivary glands are still extremely important and if she were to ever get that feeding tube removed, she would need them. Although the show does not say whether they removed her parotid, sublingual or submandibular salivary glands or all three, salivary glands are essential for keeping your mouth moist, cleaning your mouth, and if she were to ever ingest food again orally, she would need the salivary amylase secretions to start the chemical break down of starches in her food. Gypsy is denied this opportunity of normalcy because of her mother’s selfish desires.
A huge theme throughout this episode was Gypsy’s consumption of sugar. Dee Dee had convinced Gypsy that she was allergic to sugar even though later in the episode, the doctor told Dee Dee that she was not allergic given the fact that even the nutrient supplements that she was giving Gypsy had sugar in them. There was a scene in the show where Gypsy almost had some Coke from the neighbor and Dee Dee immediately whisked her away and explained what could happen if she ingested sugar. She held up an EpiPen to describe that she needed to be stuck with it if she had sugar because she was “allergic”. She then further described what a severe allergic reaction to the sugar would look like. Dee Dee explained that she would start coughing, her body would get itchy, her body would start to swell, she would turn red and her throat would start to close. In terms of a severe allergic reaction, physiologically these are all things that could happen, but obviously would not happen because she is not allergic to sugar. Later in the episode Gypsy had some icing off of a cupcake at the block party so her mother stuck her with the EpiPen. At the hospital the doctor tried to convinced Dee Dee that Gypsy was not allergic to sugar but she already knew that.
The episode ends with Gypsy getting out of bed to have sugar to see what the doctor said was actually true because she ended up overhearing the doctor say she wasn’t allergic. She walked to the fridge grabbed some whipped cream, grabbed the EpiPen just in case and ate some. Once she realized she wasn’t allergic, you could see her question her whole life, especially since she had walked to the fridge completely fine even though her mother had confined her to a wheelchair.
This story is nothing like we have ever heard before. The whole series is so intriguing and the knowledge we have acquired in anatomy and physiology from Dr. Easterling’s class help us to see the discrepancies of where Dee Dee is obviously lying and notice the inaccuracies of medical drama. It was also very eye opening to see that doctors would treat Gypsy solely based off of her mother’s word because of the excuse of Hurricane Katrina.
Along with the obvious ethical issues on both sides of Dee Dee and the doctors, we recognize that even though it was put into the series, there is a chance that what we dissected from the episode was a dramatization. Nonetheless, it was still fun to analyze the episode with what we know and have learned to be true of the human body.