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“Push me off!” yelled the scrub-clad male nurse as he placed his hands on my sternum, shifting all of his body weight onto my chest. In a bout of confusion I strained upwards, unsure exactly why the nurse was assaulting me or how fighting him off was going to lower my heart rate.
“Come on, harder! You’re not even shaking yet!” he harassed. Unsatisfied with my attempt, he reached for a syringe and administered it into my IV tube. Suddenly I felt like I was falling—through my bed, through the floor, on and on. “Feels a little funny, huh?” he said nonchalantly as the beeps from my monitor stabilized.
This scene of a doctor trying to increase my internal body pressure to slow my heart rate might seem like something from TV. That’s definitely how it felt to me, a self-proclaimed medical show junkie. The mixture of attractive actors in white lab coats, suspenseful plots and medical jargon got me hooked on shows such as House MD, Grey’s Anatomy and Scrubs. When I was diagnosed at the beginning of this school year with supraventricular tachycardia, a condition in which an extra circuit of electrical wiring in the heart enables it to beat upwards of 250 beats a minute, the flurry of emergency rooms and doctors’ offices felt familiar to me, as though I were in an episode of one of my favorite shows. But some factors were truer to life than others.
First there were the comedic moments, many of which occurred around my electrocardiograms, or EKGs, a medical procedure that monitors the electrical activity of the heart using 10 or so adhesive sensors attached to the chest. Of course, there is one catch to this procedure — in order to attach said sensors my top must come off. This initially did not seem like that big of a deal to me, until I realized that all ten attractive, young medical professionals in the emergency room, as well as both of my well-meaning parents, had now seen me with my shirt off. “At least the humiliation is over now,” I thought. However I was wrong — I still had three more EKGs to undergo during my first visit to the ER. With my newfound lack of modesty I contemplated my favorite shows, which certainly never covered this embarrassing aspect of medical care.
There were other experiences that seemed too bizarre to have come from the mind of a TV writer. I once had a male nurse talk about how he pretends to be a woman in the men’s bathroom by adopting a high pitched voice while he gave me an EKG. And not even the great minds behind Grey’s Anatomy could make up the time I received an ultrasound of my heart, complete with a cold gooey substance squirted onto my chest and some intense probing with a scanner, while a children’s video with live footage of baby animals played in the background. “I’m Speckles and I’m a baby deer!” a voiceover proclaimed, before singing a song featuring the lyrics “Baby animals just wanna have fun.”
One aspect of real-life hospitals, however, is surprisingly like television. In my experience, many doctors are shockingly attractive. After all, nothing brightens up a medical emergency like a hot mess of perfectly coiffed hair and charmingly grinning pearly whites beaming into my hospital room. I’m convinced that there must be a modeling portion of the application to the residency program at UCSF, or that a hit man has been hired to knock off all of the less-attractive doctors. Either way, the casting directors for Grey’s Anatomy definitely hit the nail on the head with their gorgeous cast.
Unfortunately, the more dramatic elements of medical shows are also present in real life. Hospitals are very emotionally charged places, and I have seen some unfortunate dramatics occur. Once in the pediatric cardiology waiting room, I watched the mother of two healthy, rambunctious toddlers approach another woman holding a tiny, obviously premature baby. “Your baby’s so tiny!” she said, grossly unaware of the sensitive nature of addressing the mother of a sick baby. “It must be so light! My babies were so big and heavy, it must be nice to have a lighter one.” The obviously-offended woman politely ended the conversation and left the waiting room, clearly offended by the obnoxious woman, who might as well have said, “Aren’t you jealous of my big, fat, healthy babies?”
In the end, my favorite medical TV shows help me to cope with and apply humor to my real-life hospital situations. The terms “vagal nerve” and “ventricle” are already in my vocabulary, and in potentially stressful situations I can imagine which doctors in the room might be coupling up. And though medical shows often take creative license, I’ll take exaggerated fictional emergencies over real ones any day. |
