Sunday, August 31, 2008

Fitness and Media Updates

Just have to brag a bit, I am being SO good about exercising that even my WiiFit is complimenting me :-)
(couldn't be a marketing ploy; it must be sincere kudos to ME, right?)

Lately I have been watching DVDs while I exercise -- I do my usual yoga warm-ups, then I do "free step" or "free run" where the WiiFit still monitors my activity, but I can watch whatever I want to on the TV.

So far, I have watched all of season 1 of Grey's Anatomy, and now I am starting on season 1 of House. Yeah, I know, I'm a sucker for medical shows.

Both of these are series I have caught a few episodes here and there of, but have never followed. Man, is it FUN to learn the background behind the characters' development as I watch these early episodes!

It's also fascinating to see what elements of real medicine and real hospital procedures they are willing to give up in order to make the shows more compelling or interesting. My favorite so far in Grey's is how nurses are portrayed. (After working as a hospital nurse, I guess I am a little sensitive to this.) In one episode the nurses are all so uninformed that when a patient's heart stops, they all stand around (and there are way too many in the room) and say to the intern who is on his very first day of work, "what do you want to do???" Yet in a later episode they manage to convincingly explain to another intern, on about her 3rd day of work, how to crack another heart-stopping patient's chest open to manually reach in and pull out a giant clot. Uh-huh, I saw that kind of inconsistency daily amongst my nursing colleagues.

Then there was the time that they wondered who had done a surgery 5 years earlier. First off, no patient in for the type of problems this patient had, would be admitted without all their hospital records coming with them. But even if they weren't... In TV-Land, a super-busy intern walks down to the medical records office (which is about the size of my bedroom, for a huge teaching hospital), finds it unstaffed, starts poking around in file cabinets, and lo-and-behold finds the historical file in a cardboard box on top of a bookshelf.

Uh-huh, right. In reality, a computer request would be made down to the huge and super-busy medical records department, and the professionals would track down the file and have it delivered, the department would never be unstaffed at a hospital that size, and they would NEVER EVER EVER let a doctor - much less an intern - into their file rooms.

So I am having a TINY bit of difficulty ignoring all that kind of stuff and focusing on the story lines. But I am committed to the task, and if I work hard at it, I manage to enjoy it.

See? Truly something for me to brag about!

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