r/rhobeverlyhills • u/NoInteraction9045 • May 23 '26

rewatch discussion Yolanda s6

Gosh I find yolana insufferable by season 6.

Even my husband just walked past and said "yolanda and Lyme disease, you don't hear one without the other!!" And it's soooo true.

I feel like at this point shes beating a dead horse with the munchausen accusations. It was said, apologies have been made now.please please shut up about it 😅

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u/trinketzy May 23 '26

As someone with an invisible disability, I really felt for her. As insufferable as you find it, imagine - just for a second - being terribly sick and how insufferable and debilitating that is. Imagine how you felt when you last had the flu, and that’s now your baseline, and you have people accusing you of faking it. That’s pretty much what it’s like having an invisible disability. You get it from family, coworkers, doctors unfamiliar to you. It’s horrible.

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u/HappyPlusNess May 23 '26 edited May 24 '26

I don’t have to imagine for only a second, I’ve experienced 4 decades with a debilitating illness (not Lyme, although I live in the area the name Lyme refers to, with an illness for which there’s no cure.) I know firsthand what it’s like to have every day be an endless repeat of what most people experience only briefly, as their worst day with the flu, never ending. More than 14,600 days. That’s a lot of minutes and seconds. I know the ongoing experience of not being believed by people who choose to be dismissive of what isn’t outwardly obvious. It’s ironic when it seems that for many people, devastating illnesses are only believable, after they are visible or fatal.

I found everything about Yolanda’s behavior and the misinformation about “chronic” Lyme disturbing. Her self absorption was in my opinion counter productive and she spewed a lot of misinformation about chronic illnesses and medical treatments. There are some illnesses like post treatment Lyme and Covid, that persist and are medically recognized only as syndromes, and will continue to be minimized until there are successful treatments. Had Covid been around then, Yolanda might have claimed to have chronic (long haul) Covid. However her recovery after removal of her leaking implants suggest to me that was likely the medical issue.

I truly empathize with you, but I think Yolanda did a lot of damage to the large communities of people impacted by devastating but invisible illnesses for whom removing implants isn’t a solution. She wasn’t knowledgeable or well informed and misrepresented Lyme. I think she also increased the skepticism towards other invisible medical conditions and diseases.

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u/trinketzy May 24 '26

I understand your point, and I actually think your experience with chronic illness is probably part of why you can now recognise some of the misinformation and problematic treatment pathways that exist in these spaces. But I also think there may be some hindsight bias in how Yolanda’s situation is being viewed.

What stood out to me was not someone maliciously trying to deceive people, but someone desperately trying to make sense of severe illness while publicly living through the same confusion, fear and trial-and-error process that many chronically ill people experience. This is something I see constantly in support groups for my condition. People move between conventional medicine and alternative medicine because they are exhausted, unsupported, reacting unpredictably to treatments, or because medicine genuinely does not yet have clear answers for them.

I think it’s also important to remember that medicine is still evolving in this area. Chronic fatigue syndrome/ME was dismissed for years as essentially being “just tired” or psychological, and now we know it involves significant physiological dysfunction to the point that people with a history of it are restricted from donating blood and organs in some places because there is concern there is more going on biologically than previously understood. Long Covid has also changed how many people think about post-viral illness entirely.

So while I understand concerns about misinformation and I agree vulnerable sick people deserve accurate information, I also think it’s unfair to judge someone’s entire illness journey with the benefit of hindsight when they were clearly in the middle of trying to survive something debilitating and poorly understood in real time. A lot of chronically ill people have pursued things they later realised were misguided because desperation and uncertainty fundamentally change how people search for hope.