A Sick Binge

Things I learned from hundreds of hours in a familiar, fictional hospital during a pandemic.

Most people would be annoyed or alarmed to spend a couple of hours in a hospital emergency room.

I just spent 330 hours in one. By choice. And I wasn’t even sick.

Fortunately my “ER” was as fictional as it is – in 2022 – defunct. County General Hospital, which treated untold hundreds of patients for 15 years, closed its doors in the summer of 2009 when NBC canceled the critically acclaimed two-letter drama (which regularly forayed into comedy).

With social and public entertainment options limited by the ebbs and flows of pandemic restrictions, the time was right for a revisit of the show my wife and I had faithfully followed in its original run. No insurance required, just the cost of  a Hulu subscription.

On the occasion of a recent virtual reunion of most of the cast, including the breakout star of the first six seasons George Clooney, I figured I’d only watch a few episodes of the first season. Fifteen seasons, 22 episodes apiece, seemed way too much of a commitment.

As it turned out, I would soon present with strong symptoms of addiction, with side effects that include randomly thinking of terms like “tachycardic” and “status asthmaticus” and telling strangers they appeared diaphoretic and altered.

What made “ER” such an uncommon hit for the era, and still today, was the massive attention to detail not only in the trauma and surgery scenes, but in the lives and connections of the characters, not to mention a parade of established and emerging talents in the constantly refreshed cast (by season 15 no original leading stars remained.)

Understanding my condition during these weeks requires a full diagnostic workup. As of this writing I am two full years displaced from my Manhattan office, working 5 days a week from home, with almost no opportunity to travel for work or otherwise. (To spice things up a bit I began begun alternating between three workstations in the house, although none has a water cooler or communal coffee machine.)

Even with some sporadic social gatherings, life has been not just humdrum, but worrisome, as the world has experienced pandemic highs and lows, and each of us has by now experienced multiple real or feared bouts with illness of ourselves or those close to us. Now we’ve also got a lovely little war and the threat of global conflict to contend with.

Within that fake, bustling Chicago ER I found a thriving center of control in the face of chaos. Not every patient wheeled in by gurney with the signature crash through the doors had a happy outcome. But for the most part, every one of the numerous feuds between doctors, nurses, administrators, orderlies and clerks depicted in the show were put aside for the sake of patient care. (In quite a few cases doctors and nurses, doctors and doctors, or doctors and patients did a little more in the interpersonal area than put bad feelings aside.)

In this place if anyone suffers from vasovagal syncope, an MI, an MVC or a triple A, someone will be along to give them a Babinsky, peritoneal lavage or perform an Ex-Lap.

Not to say chaos didn’t frequently win out. In sweeps-month episodes, the ER staff faced more than one gun battle, a plague outbreak, fires, power outages and runaway vehicles, including a memorable helicopter crash in the ambulance bay.

And then there’s the malpractice. What’s most refreshing about the show is its willingness to show the stars with all their flaws and let viewers pass judgment on their lapses in judgment and morality, and especially on the rampant sexual and racial harassment that is bound to shock today’s younger viewers, more accustomed to fare in which such behavior –where it exists at all-- would entail an entire episode plot, rather than just a recurring plot device.

The worst offender in this area, by far was chief surgeon Robert Romano, as portrayed by Paul McCrane, a miserable ogre who, in his most jarring incarnation after suffering a career-changing amputation, walks through the ER hurling the lowest-denominator insult at literally everyone, patients and staff alike.

Unlike other shows in the genre, ER’s producers never tried to impart saccharine lessons about life and love with themes, metaphors or corny narrative overlays, nor did they concern themselves with tidily resolving plot threads with happy or even complete endings, often content to leave questions lingering.

With little in real life feeding my imagination, “ER” with its weeks of content, turned into a virtual staycation for me, with a regular routine of checking IMDB for familiar faces, many of whom, like Marissa Hargitay, Christina Hendricks, Shia Labeouf, Kirsten Dunst, Jessica Chastain and Octavia Spencer, were just an audition or two away from big breaks. It was far enough away from 1^st viewing that I couldn’t recall ultimate fates and key plotlines for main characters, such as the cruel fate of Dr. Romano (who would soon be replaced by not one but two similarly bald, pencil-pushing misanthropes, though neither or them – SPOILER ALERT – died.)

While there have been many jokes about being able to practice medicine after watching this highly detailed and realistically consulted drama, I make no pretense of even being able to pass a second-day-of-medical-school quiz. But I do understand that “asystole” is the very last thing you want to hear in the ER and sadly, for some it is.

Plenty of other takeaways too, other than the predictable “importance of teamwork” (yada yada yada) trope. For instance:

·       Patient care tends to suffer when doctors, literally or figuratively, are screwing each other.

·       Never, ever get on the wrong side of the nurses

·       Never jump to fast conclusions in diagnoses, especially based on assumptions about patients (acting drunk isn’t necessarily drunk)

·       Mistakes, even fatal ones, don’t have to end a career

·       Insulting and demeaning coworkers makes a leader less powerful, not more, by parading his insecurity

·       A TV show can survive the departure of its biggest star if its premise, ensemble and writing team are strong enough to pick up the slack

Overall, it felt transformative to be at the heart of all that well-portrayed caring, dedication and medicine. And I didn’t even get a bill,.

 

 

Adam Dickter, who works in public relations and lives on New York’s Long Island, presents strong vitals, and has no history of vasovagal syncope.