Last night after dinner, Angela and I clocked in for our shift at The Pitt. It’s a little joke we have after seeing a meme about how we all feel like medical pros after watching just one and a half seasons of the hit show. (Side note: yesterday Angela’s boss referenced a possible medical treatment for a student he’d seen on The Pitt last week. So we are not alone in these feelings.)
I love medical shows. I remember falling so in love with ER after its pilot aired when I was a senior in high school that I checked out MCAT books from the library. (Spoiler alert: I was not then nor will ever be suited for medical school much less anything to do with working in an actual hospital setting. However, I would love to write a medical drama someday. I’d kill it. Pun intended.)
When a little show called Grey’s Anatomy premiered Angela was actually in-patient at a hospital in Chicago. She watched it in her room and called me immediately telling me I needed to watch it when it premiered an hour later in my time zone back in Kalamazoo. We’ve been watching it together for the last 22 years.
I will give almost any hospital or medical show a shot. (Do not get me started on Brilliant Minds, the apparently-little seen NBC show that was just pulled before us fans could get an answer to the season two mystery!) And I enjoy the heck out of most of them.
Well, I used to.
Now I approach them with a bit more trepidation. After having spent the last 11 years dealing with my own medical mysteries, medical issues, and medical anxiety, watching my favorite shows can be scary.
It seems I can’t go a few episodes of television without someone getting a blood clot (shout out to my legs where some invisible to the naked eye clots still reside), someone dying of a DVT (ah, a quieter shout out to the lung that fought off my very own DVT and still functions just fine, albeit a little less when I’m walking on any sort of an incline), or a woman missing signs of a heart attack (I know I haven’t had an actual heart attack but my symptoms were freaking real and the guide wire they put in my groin to double-check my heart’s health was terrifying to think about), or hearing about how a woman’s hypercoaguable state could cause vision loss and/or eye stroke!? (hi, my name is Sarah and I have antiphospholipid syndrome with a hypercoaguable state and yes, I know that’s super rare and super interesting if you’re a doctor and I’ll answer your questions and then can we please get back to my sinus infection? Thanks!).
So last night’s episode of The Pitt hit a little close to home. First, we had the guy who is on Eliquis still hanging around to get his D-Dimer checked (yep, blood test I have had and still get regularly!) and is actually just there because he’s WORRIED. I see you, my guy. I am you, my guy. (I have gone to the ER because of what turned out to be a panic attack after having a very real medical event associated with my blood disorder. The symptoms were physical. The nurse practitioner who treated me was the kindest and most reassuring person I had ever met in an emergency room and I think about her whenever my brain tries to dismiss symptoms of anything that my brain deems frivolous. She told me to advocate for myself and I will always try to remember to do that.
Then we had the woman who came in with partial blindness and the second the doctor mentioned in passing that she didn’t have a history of a hypercoaguable state I held my breath. And then I paused the TV and asked Angela if that could happen to me. She kindly reminded me that I am on anticoagulants to prevent just such a thing but much like my Eliquis guy, I wasn’t easily convinced. (And obviously, because I’m writing about this now, I am still not one hundred percent convinced and may never be but I know that and can move on.)
And finally we had Howard. The big guy with the big health concerns who waited until it was almost too late to get himself help. I have been Howard. In more ways than one.
When I went to the ER for the aforementioned panic attack after a blood clot incident, I was hesitant to go at first because surely my symptoms didn’t warrant the trip. Surely there were people who needed medical attention more than I did. Surely I didn’t want to take up space or time or take those things away from people who needed them, nee deserved them, more than me.
Also, if you know me or have seen a picture of me, you know I am a big person. Not as big as Howard but big all the same. I can’t count how many times I have been treated in medical situations differently because of my weight. Sometimes it’s the assumption that I have diabetes or high blood pressure or something else just because of my weight. Sometimes (almost ALWAYS) it’s that the blood pressure cuff doesn’t fit me and the medical professional either takes an inaccurate reading or just doesn’t take a reading. (Twice in recent years I’ve had medical professionals deal with this differently. One went in search of a cuff that fit and read the riot act to her staff when they didn’t have necessary tools available for her use in the room. Another took my pressure himself twice during an appointment, by hand, with an appropriate cuff, after he knew I’d have calmed down a bit, and declared my pressure perfect as he knew it would be.)
But twice assumptions about weight and bodies and people in general led to embarrassment for me in hospitals and in front of other people, things that really really suck. When I first was diagnosed with blood clots and the blood disease I have, I had to stay in the hospital and because at that time I did not have health insurance, I had to be transferred from the fancy hospital I went to that was closest to my house, to a hospital a million miles away from my house. (Fine, Alahambra isn’t a million miles away from Los Angeles but it sure seemed like it at the time. For the record it is 20 miles from where I lived at the time. And somewhere I’d never ever been.)
I guess at some point they weighed me, I think they had a scale on the bed, and well, I don’t know if no one looked at me or considered what any of anything meant but when I had to be transferred it was late at night. Because of course, LA is a busy city and ambulances tend to go to priority patients, and transferring me was not a priority. And because it was late at night I wasn’t paying much attention. I was worried about my swollen leg and my pressing medical issues. And when someone asked if I could walk I said yes, of course. And when someone else asked if I could get myself onto the ambulance gurney I said sure. And I got up and I moved myself onto the plastic travel gurney. I was more or less fine at that point. And out of immediate danger. And just wanted to get all of the moving to the new hospital out of the way. And that’s when I noticed a group of firefighters standing in the hallway outside of my ER room.
They weren’t just standing there, they were watching me. Because they’d been called for me. To help me. To move me from my ER bed to the gurney. Because someone told them or mis-told them that I needed help. And with my weight being what it was or what it was assumed to be, they felt the need to bring a whole freaking brigade.
They quickly left and I tried not to think about what had happened. (I’ve obviously never thought about it since that day!)
And then, when I got to the hospital and got taken up to the room they’d prepared for me, something seemed off. I remember the nurse who walked alongside my gurney on the ride upstairs. He was funny. And maybe a little nervous. He said wires had been crossed and it was fine and I was in great hands and yes, he’d get me something to eat since I hadn’t eaten all day, and yes, my sister could stay a while even though visiting hours were over since she’d followed the ambulance all those million miles to Alhambra. And then when they wheeled me into my room, there it was.
A GIANT hospital bed.
Like a double hospital bed. So big they’d put me in a room all by myself because there wasn’t room for a second bed.
Someone had relayed my weight and someone else was sure that I couldn’t possibly fit into a regular size hospital bed. Probably the same kind of person who’d decided I needed the whole cast of Chicago Fire to lift me onto a gurney.
Anyway, we all chuckled politely and then Angela sat with me in the giant bed every time she came to visit because it was pretty comfy and hospital chairs never are.
In The Pitt episode Howard was so sweet and so polite and tried to be funny and was oh so thankful and hi, again, that’s me. I always try my best to thank everyone profusely. Because I know I am taking up space and time and resources and effort. Not just because of my weight or my mental distress but often due to my mysteries. My health insurance is such that I am thankful for it, eternally grateful, and I am constantly aware of how tenuous my current situation is. I fear that I could become that person adjusting his meds (hi, reboot of the medical sitcom Scrubs that had a storyline about this very thing this very week!) or not seeking care because of cost in the blink of an eye. That anxiety comes in waves but is never more real than when I am in a doctor’s office or hospital and am faced with the actual cost of care. And the potential cost of not getting the care I need.
And yes, I am careful to get that care. I try my best to keep all the appointments and tasks and concerns straight and juggle it with my insurance woes and my sanity. It’s never easy. And while watching my favorite shows adds to my emotional stress at times, it also comforts me. It’s a salve to the reality that is our current national healthcare crisis. One I am acutely aware of for so many reasons.
When I was getting my masters in communication at Western Michigan University, I took a class called simply Health Communication. And for my research project in the class I wrote a paper titled “Health information and entertainment television: Do perceptions represent reality or make-believe?”
Here’s the abstract for the 24-page long paper:
Health communication research has only recently begun to look at how television sends, or fails to send, accurate or inaccurate health-related messages. The question being asked by this study is how and why television affects people’s perceptions of health care and the medical community. A review of relevant literature surrounding the areas of mass media and health issues, entertainment-education, prosocial television, and health information content and use will lay a foundation for the study. A content analysis of 22 episodes from the television medical drama ER will be utilized to create a survey to gather information about how the television program affects people’s perceptions of health care. The study will target 2 populations: college-age, as well as retirement-age persons who are regular viewers of ER, to determine if there is a difference in how different age groups utilize health information gained via television.
(I told you that ER had an affect on me.)
I am a staunch believer that television (or maybe now Tik Tok or Reels or Youtube) can and does have an affect on people. We can talk about the effects of Heated Rivalry (the uptick in NHL ticket sales, not to mention the author’s book sales, and the subsequent fall of those hockey players fans had put on a pedestal who came out in a very different way this last week). Or the effects of police and military shows on copaganda (yes, I love these shows and yes, I am a believer that copaganda is detrimental to all of us, I am large, I contain multitudes just like Mr. Whitman). Or how comedies lift our spirits or how emotional moments are cathartic or any number of things media can and does do for us.
Television affects me in all of those ways. Good and bad. Sometimes it’s knowing I need to turn off something I’m not enjoying or that’s making me upset or even bored. Sometimes it’s helping me to feel seen, as The Pitt did last night and for many other shifts before that. Television helps me understand the world. Just as writing does. And if you’re still reading (this is a very long blog for someone who hasn’t been blogging much lately - hey, I made a movie and wrote two whole books so I haven’t just been slacking!), know you are also affecting me by reading my stories. Here’s to happy, healthy times ahead for all of us, and more seasons of The Pitt!
