Thursday, October 27, 2011

Ruined

Nursing has enriched my life outside of my career in so, so many ways. Especially being an ER nurse. Very little truly frightens me anymore. I'm able to help my loved ones if they need me. It's actually helped me overcome my shyness. I generally have a good story to tell my friends.
But. That said, nursing has ruined me for a lot of things. Meat? Yeah, now that I've seen human muscle fibers in all the states I have, I can't eat it. That's been good for me, so whatever. Anything grape flavored is over forever. Once you've done a couple of Kayexalate enemas, that's pretty much done. The biggest change in my life is TV, though.
Like, if a show has terrible medical consulting I CANNOT watch it. I was the biggest Law and Order junkie that ever was, up until they tried to make fetch happen with all their stupid spinoff series, but Law and Order original flavor ruled. I still get pretty excited when a re-run I haven't seen comes on, which is rare. So the other day a re-run of an 80s episode comes on where some kid codes in the beginning. I definitely hadn't seen it, but I could not even get past the code, because it was done TERRIBLY. Like, they call some code blue in the ER overhead, which, whatever, I suppose maybe they do that somewhere, and then they're bagging this kid and not doing compressions, and then they try to shock her out of asystole, and then they call it, like, 2 minutes in. It was awful. I mean, I could not have watched the rest of the episode for anything.

I wish it was only stuff that blatant, but I nitpick so many shows and I know my husband is totally over it by now. We're watching The Walking Dead right now, which is amazing. The medical consulting isn't awful, but it certainly isn't excellent. Like, they threw out this stuff in the last season where they're trying to scientifically explain the zombie virus and this dude in the CDC is all like "it spreads through the brain tissue, like in meningitis." Um, no. And then this week *SPOILER ALERT* Rick's son gets shot and needs surgery and then OMG his best friend who also is kind of a creep and banged his wife after telling her Rick was dead has to go to the local FEMA center which is overrun by zombies with the dude who accidentally shot Rick's son who happens to be a volunteer EMT to get a ventilator and other shit so this veterinarian guy the met can do surgery on his kid. Anyway. You should really watch that show if you're not watching it already. So, they're in there gathering supplies or whatever, and volunteer EMT/kid shooter dude picks up a laryngoscope blade and handle and he's like, " I got me an endotracheal intubator". At which point, I immediately rolled my eyes and said "no one calls it that", shaking my head just in time to look over at my husband, who at that moment had obviously just lost the last bit of enjoyment he had in watching the TV show based on his favorite comic book due to my inability to shut the eff up about any slight medical discrepancy.
Sigh. Sorry, husband. I wish I could get past it, too, but probably not near as much as you do.

13 comments:

  1. I hear ya. Same thing happened with me. I criticize the heck out of anything medical that comes up. Also found that watching "Birth Story" makes me feel like I've worked a whole shift - exhausting. Never mind they leave out a whole LOT of REAL stuff. I NEVER watch anything with a hint of medical in it. Just can't.

    (and I verge on vegetarian also. Definitely can't eat anything bloody)

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  2. That's the whole reason why I can't stomach shows like Nurse Jackie and Hawthorne. My husband just laughs at me every time we're watching something and I blurt out "Nobody says that in the ER!" or "That would never happen that way!".

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  3. My fiance luckily just thinks it is cute when I correct medical shows.

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  4. As a medical transcriptionist, you should see the corrections I made to my medical record after my treatments at Mayo Clinic. They finally got it right. Their records stated my symptoms occurred after eating and I had a good appetite when what I had said (in person and in the medical records they had received) that my symptoms had no relationship to eating and that I had no appetite and had lost 20 pounds in less than 2 months. How can you assess for response to treatments if you don't have the symptoms correct? I nitpick the local newspapers, e-mails, etc. It is annoying to my husband also when I fly into a snit because of the misuse of there/their and similar things in print.

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  5. My dad's been an ER doc for 25+ years. I still remember when ER (the tv series) originally premiered years and years ago -- watching it with dad definitely took the fun out of the show. :(

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  6. Dude. Hawthorne gave me TIAs . That show is the worst. I watched about 5 minutes of the show where she was seriously telling some patient to make bed sheet rope to escape the hospital because he was magically cured but not discharged. I was yelling at my TV. JUST GIVE HIM AN AMA FORM!

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  7. I was reading an Anita Shreve novel "Rescue" and the paramedics yell "Lungs clear and bilateral". It totally ruined the book for me. Do your research authors and editors! I should hope someone has bilateral lungs:)

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  9. Agreed! I work in L&D and anytime I see a birth on tv shows or in the movies it drives me crazy to see a 12 pound, pink baby given to the mother!!! Seriously?! And what happened to sterile fields?

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  10. Law & Order: SVU makes me nuts, because they always do CPR for like 10 seconds and then someone steps in and says, gently but firmly, "[Detective.] Stop. S/he's gone. There was no pulse." If the victim had had a pulse, would you have been doing CPR in the first place? Please.

    Also, I love how when they *do* end up doing CPR for more than 10 seconds, the person always magically coughs and wakes up. Uh huh.

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  11. And I love how Rick and only Rick could give blood to poor little Carl. Really? Nobody else has a compatible type? Where my universal donors at?!!!

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  12. Heh! I call inserting foleys/straight caths as "intubating the bladder" all the time :-p

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  13. Haha. I always offer to do a stat penibation in our resus rooms if a patient needs a foley. It gets a laugh about 25 % of the time.

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