Reality TV

Medical dramas crack me up. I used to watch House during my first year of medical school and try to guess what was on the differential as they went through the case (lupus was always on the list...it's not lupus). It cracks me up how Hollywood portrays medicine. Doctors specialize in everything, you can always find the right answers if you get enough clues, and everyone's make-up is always perfect. Oh, and no one ever knows how to pronounce basic medical terms (drives me CRAZY!). [Side note: I'm watching "Body of Proof" and up until this point, the episode was fairly believable, but Dr. Hunt just opened a guy's belly with a steak knife in his kitchen and didn't even have to cut through any muscle or fascia. That was easy!] In reality, medicine is far less glamorous. There's way too much out there to know everything. I know on House, they do their own CT scans and brain surgery, but we each have our niche, and we learn it very well (This month, mine is catching babies and airway, unless they're sick; then it's catch and get the heck out of the way). We almost never find all the answers, and often we send patients home with a very unsatisfying, "We don't know what it was but it's better now." And I look less than put-together after a 30 hour call (the pillow lines on my face from my half hour of sleep, and the scrub cap that I had to wear half the night didn't help). But I think our version is better. In our version, you get the ecstatic grandmother screaming "Alleluia. Gracias a Dios!" when her granddaughter is born, you get the crazy mom hugging you at 2 in the morning for taking good care of her son when she couldn't, you get a 5 year old drawing pictures of ducks and butterflies for you at her check up. Makes the scrub-cap hair worth it.