What a Nurse Things of Medical Shows
For the link up this month, Anna and I decided to talk about our opinions of medical tv shows.
Oh girl, don't even get me started.
As a general rule, nurses aren't portrayed in the best light. Nurse Jackie is a drug addict? Nurses are sex symbols? and idiots?
Uh, right. Okay.
But if we ignore the horrible symbolism of nurses in tv shows and focus just on the medical aspect, I just have to laugh.
One thing that always drives me nuts is the continuous beeping of an EKG monitor.
While its true that machines beep in real life, it does not usually beep in sequence with your heart....at least in the two ICUs and two telemetry floors I've worked on. I mean seriously, can you imagine laying in bed 24 hours a day with a monitor continually beeping with your heart beat? What if your heart beat sped up? Imagine how much more anxious you'd be to hear your heart beat speed up!
Honestly, most of the time, I have to give up on shows getting any kind of medicine right. Cody and I were watching one movie, that I can not remember the name of, and a lady was trying to get away from a kidnapper so she dialed up some insulin on her insulin pen and gave a guy a shot.
Well, first off, I've never seen an insulin pen with a permanent needle attached. On all the ones I've used, you have to attach a new needle and then give yourself your insulin, but there can be different manufacturers so I'll give the movie the benefit of the doubt.
But the thing that got me was, why did this work instantly?! Usually in a pen, you'll either have a mix of regular insulin or intermediate acting insulin or just regular insulin, these are not IMMEDIATELY acting drugs! And why on earth did the guy fall out and pass out instantly? Just no.
As you can probably imagine, I can talk all day about this, but now it's YOUR turn. If you're a nurse/nursing student, link your opinion on medical tv shows up!
4 comments:
I feel the same way and I'm not even in the medical field. I feel like Hollywood thinks all its viewers are idiots sometimes.
I don't remember about the medical aspect, but I feel like ER gave the nurses, in general, a much better story than current shows do.
Let's seriously hope that nursing shows and medical portrayals on TV and in movies are incorrect. Otherwise, I'm never letting another nurse touch me as I already have the bad luck of already getting the worst of the worst it seems. Maybe its just me but nursing shows and movies make nurses seem very emotionally unstable/have personal lives with drama that always seems to spill over into their work. Which I don't know about other people but if I'm really upset, hurt, angry, or sad about something my work always suffers in some way. That can be so dangerous if you're a nurse.
"Imagine how much more anxious you'd be to hear your heart beat speed up!"
I don't have to imagine that - sometimes when I get tachycardia I can hear my heartbeat without trying, or feel it beating through my stomach or neck, and it's NERVERACKING. Terrible.
Have you seen Mercy? I really loved what I saw of it. Can't vouch for accuracy but it was about nurses, so they were portrayed in a pretty badass way.
- Lix | A Classic Notion
I have PVCs and SVTs and they are freaky enough when I feel them on a normal day! But if I was attached to a monitor that beeped with my heartbeat when I had a post-op PE, that alone would probably have sent me into a heart attack! Scariest thing I ever went through, ugh.
Post a Comment