medical shows and me

i've been watching a lot of medical tv shows lately, and it has started me thinking about two things:
1) i've amassed quite a collection of medical vocabulary and dialogue
2) i've become impressively desensitized to things like blood and guts

before i start, i should really stress just how many of these hospital shows i've seen and consequently become addicted to. the medical show genre in and of itself is a fairly compelling one to me, and most of them are similar enough to each other that when you find yourself engrossed in one, it's pretty easy to get pulled into another.

for me, it started out simply enough. there was an 'er' marathon on tv not too long ago, and of course i tuned in, mostly because i find it easier to concentrate for long periods of time when there's some sort of noise in the background. anyway, i realized how long it had been since i had seen the show, and i instantly remembered how much i loved it when it was on. when the marathon was finished, i decided i was not finished watching people get cut open, get treated for crazy diseases or die in impressive accidents. naturally, i popped 'grey's anatomy' into my dvd player, and the rest is history. i went through 'er,' 'grey's,' 'private practice,' 'house,' 'scrubs,' even those now-cancelled shows like 'doogie howser' and 'northern exposure.' i knew it was bad when i started really scraping the bottom of the barrel with 'mercy' and 'trauma.'

this brings me to thing 1. watching all these shows, i have become far more conversant in medical vocabulary than is natural for an advertising major such as myself.

i know all the acronyms and shortened words like AMA (against medical advice), CBC (complete blood count), DNR (do not resuscitate), NICU (Neo-natal Intensive Care Unit), GCS (Glascow Coma Score), PVC (Premature Ventricular Contraction), SVT (Supra Ventricular Tachychardia), V-Fib (Ventricular Fibrillation), and so much more. but then again, most people know these things.

through continued viewership, i have learned what it is the doctors are actually doing when they perform things like angioplasties (inserting a catheter with a balloon tip to open up an artery), intubations (inserting a tube down a patient's throat to help them breathe), crikes (cutting open the throat, putting a tube directly in the throat when intubation won't work), lavages (basically washing out an organ to get rid of bacteria), pericardiosenteses (inserting a syringe into the pericardium to drain any fluid that has collected there) thoracotomies (opening the chest to get directly to the heart in order to massage it back to life if the patient is in asytole, or flatlining).

i can comprehend what a doctor means when they diagnose a patient with most things, such as cystic fibrosis, edema, encephalopathy, hyperkalemia, nephropathy... all sorts of things. i know the symptoms for the more common diseases and conditions, i know what most commonly-used drugs are for, and i know what most medical instruments do. i know i'm not actually a doctor, but i think it's more intriguing to watch hospital shows when i know what the characters are talking about.

given that i'm so engrossed by all these shows, i guess thing 2 comes as no surprise. my blood and guts tolerance level is pretty stratospheric. not only can i handle lots of the explicit medical stuff, i'm genuinely disappointed when i feel a show could have been more gratuitous with the organs spilling out of bodies and blood spattering all over the place.

the only thing, by way of explanation, that i can really equate this idea to is a coffee drinker who drinks so much coffee that after a while 3 spoonfuls of grounds doesn't provide much of a caffeine jolt anymore, so they start adding 5 spoonfuls of grounds. it's like most shows are that pot of coffee with 3 spoonfuls of coffee grounds, but i've watched so much of it that in order to be really shocked, i need the 5-spoonful show.

i'm sure a lot of this has come from violent movies, too. the average person is exposed to a crazy amount of violence on tv and film, but those of us who actually seek out the 'zombielands' and the 'texas chainsaw massacres' of cinema operate on a whole different level. watching 'kill bill: vol. 1' with a friend of mine whose preferred genre of entertainment generally involves a 'boy meets girl, boy loses girl, hilarity ensues, girl forgives boy' plot line, i realized not everyone is like me.

intense hospital shows definitely share the credit in differentiating the quentin tarantinos from the hannah montanas of the world, and that might be part of the reason i love them so much.