My first week working at NBC, I was assigned to two shows that were about to premiere: ER, a medical drama, and Friends, a sitcom. These shows would catapult the network to number one and establish its Thursday-night dominance for years to come.
The series were set to air in the fall, following a much faster cycle than in the film world. Within months, casts and crews were hired, sets were built, and production began. I was in the room when Jennifer Aniston and Courteney Cox auditioned for starring roles in Friends. I weighed in on whether Julianna Margulies’s character in ER should die at the end of episode one, and I was on the set with George Clooney before anyone knew how famous this series would make him.
Energized by this new job, I watched less TV at home. I had stories I was passionate about and colleagues who were equally passionate about those stories, and I felt connected to my work again.
One day ER’s writers called up a local emergency department with a medical question, and a physician named Joe happened to take the call. It seemed like kismet—in addition to his medical degree, he had a master’s in film production.
When the writers learned of Joe’s background, they began to consult him regularly. Before long, they hired him as a technical adviser to block out the highly choreographed trauma-bay scenes, teach the actors how to pronounce medical terms, and make the procedures look as accurate as possible (flush out the syringe; wipe the skin with alcohol before starting an IV; hold the patient’s neck in this position when inserting a breathing tube). Of course, sometimes we skipped the surgical masks the characters should have worn, because everyone wanted to see George Clooney’s face.
On set, Joe was a study in competence and calm, the same qualities that served him in a real ER. During breaks, he would talk about patients he’d seen recently, and I’d want to hear every detail. What stories! I thought. One day I asked Joe if I could visit him on the job—“Research,” I said—and he offered me access to his ER, where, in borrowed baggy scrubs, I followed him around during his shift.
“The drunk drivers and gang shootings don’t start pouring in until dark,” he explained when I arrived on a Saturday afternoon and not much was going on. But soon we were rushing from room to room, patient to patient, as I tried to keep the names and charts and diagnoses straight. In the span of an hour, I watched Joe do a lumbar puncture, see inside a pregnant woman’s uterus, and hold the hand of a thirty-nine-year-old mother of twins as she was told that her migraine was really a brain tumor.
“No, you see, we just wanted more migraine medicine” was her only response—denial that would soon give way to a rush of tears. Her husband excused himself to go to the restroom but vomited on the way. For a second I pictured this drama on TV—an ingrained instinct when your work is coming up with stories—but I had a sense that finding TV material wasn’t only what being here was about for me. And Joe sensed that, too. Week after week, I kept going back to the ER.
“You seem more interested in what we’re doing here than in your day job,” Joe said one evening months later as we looked at an x-ray together and he showed me where the fracture was. Then, almost as an afterthought, he said, “You could still go to medical school, you know.”
“Medical school?” I said. I looked at him like he was nuts. I was twenty-eight years old and had been a language major in college. It was true that in high school I’d competed in math and science tournaments, but outside of school, I’d always been drawn to words and stories. And now my work was a great job at NBC that I felt incredibly lucky to have.
Even so, I kept sneaking away from tapings to go back to the ER—not just with Joe but with other doctors who let me shadow them too. I knew that my being there had gone from research to hobby, but so what? Didn’t everyone have hobbies? And, okay, sure, maybe spending my evenings in the ER had become the new equivalent of obsessively watching TV every night when I was restless in my film job. Again, so what? I certainly wasn’t about to give all this up and start over in medical school. Besides, I wasn’t bored by the work at NBC. I just felt that something real and big and meaningful was happening in the ER that couldn’t happen in the same way on television. And my hobby could fill in those blanks—that’s what hobbies were for.
But sometimes I’d be standing in the ER, and, during a lull in the action, I’d realize how at home I felt, and more and more I wondered if Joe was onto something.
Before long, my hobby led me out of the ER and into a neurosurgery suite. The case I’d been invited to see was that of a middle-aged man with a pituitary tumor that was likely benign but had to be removed to keep it from pressing on his cranial nerves. Gowned and masked and wearing running shoes for comfort, I stood over Mr. Sanchez, peering into his skull. After sawing through the bone (using a tool like something you’d buy at Home Depot), the surgeon and his team meticulously pulled aside layer after layer of fascia until they reached his naked brain.
Finally, there it was, looking just like the images I’d seen in a book the night before, but as I stood there, my own brain inches from Mr. Sanchez’s, I felt a sense of awe. Everything that made this man himself—his personality, his memories, his experiences, his likes and dislikes, his loves and losses, his knowledge and abilities—was contained in this three-pound organ. You lose a leg or a kidney, you’re still you, but lose a part of your brain—literally, lose your mind—and who are you then?
I had a perverse thought: I’ve gotten inside a person’s head! Hollywood tried to get into people’s heads all the time via market research and ads, but I was actually there, deep inside this man’s skull. I wondered if those slogans the network bombarded viewers with ever made it to their destinations: It’s Must See TV!
As classical music played softly in the background and two neurosurgeons picked away at the tumor, carefully depositing pieces of it onto a metal tray, I thought of the frenetic sets in Hollywood with all of their commotion and commands.
“Come on, people! Let’s go!” An actor would be rushed down a hallway on a stretcher, red liquid drenching his clothes, but then someone would turn the corner too quickly. “Shit!” the director would say. “Jesus, people, let’s get it right this time!” Burly men with cameras and lights would rush around in a frenzy, resetting the scene. I’d see a producer pop a pill—Tylenol or Xanax or Prozac?—and down it with sparkling water. “I’m gonna have a heart attack if we don’t get this shot today.” He’d sigh. “I swear, I’m gonna die.”
In the OR with Mr. Sanchez, there was no yelling, no one feeling as if a coronary was imminent. Even Mr. Sanchez, with his head sawed open, seemed less stressed out than the people on the set. As the surgical team worked, “Please” and “Thank you” peppered each request, and if it weren’t for the steady stream of blood dripping out of a man’s head and into a bag near my leg, I might have mistaken this place for fantasy. And in a way it was. It was at once more real than anything I had ever seen and also galaxies away from what I considered to be my actual life back in Hollywood, a place I had no intention of leaving.
But months later, everything changed.
I’m following an ER doctor in a county hospital on a Sunday. As we approach a curtain, he says, “Forty-five-year-old with complications from diabetes.” He pulls back the curtain and I see a woman lying on the table under a sheet. That’s when the smell hits my nostrils—an assault so vile I worry I might faint. I can’t identify the odor because I’ve never smelled anything this nauseating in my life. Has she defecated? Vomited?
I see no signs of either, but the smell becomes so powerful that I feel the lunch I ate an hour ago rise into my throat, and I swallow hard to keep it down. I hope she can’t see how pale I must be or sense the queasiness taking over my gut. I’m thinking: Maybe it’s coming from the next bed over. Maybe if I move more to this side of the room, I won’t smell it so strongly. I concentrate on the woman’s face—watery eyes, reddish cheeks, bangs over her sweaty forehead. The doctor is asking her questions and I can’t understand how he manages to breathe. I’ve been trying to hold my breath this entire time, but I have to come up for air.
Okay, I tell myself. Here goes.
I take in some air and the smell seizes my body. Steadying myself against the wall, I look on as the doctor lifts the sheet covering the woman’s legs. Only there are no lower legs. Her diabetes has caused severe vasculitis, and all that remain are two stumps above the knees. One has gangrene, and I can’t decide if the sight of this infected stump, all black and moldy like a rotten fruit, is worse than its smell.
The space is small, and I move closer to the woman’s head, as far away from the infected stump as possible, and that’s when something extraordinary happens. This woman takes my hand and smiles at me as if to say, I know this is hard to watch, but it’s okay. Even though I’m the one who should be holding her hand, even though she’s the one with the missing appendages and a massive infection, she’s reassuring me. And though this could make a great story line on ER, in that millisecond, I know I won’t be working on that show much longer.
I am going to medical school.
Maybe that’s an impulsive reason to change careers—the fact that this graceful stranger with a blackened stump is holding my hand as I try not to barf—but something is happening inside me that I’ve never felt at any of my Hollywood jobs. I still love TV, but there’s something about the real stories I’m experiencing in person that seduce me and make the imaginary ones feel thin. Friends is about community, but a fake one. ER is about life and death, but they’re fictional. Instead of taking these stories I witness and folding them back into my world at the network, I want real life—real people—to be my world.
As I drive home from the hospital that day, I don’t know how or when this might happen or what kind of medical-school loans I can get or even if I can get in. I don’t know how many science classes I’ll have to take to meet the requirements and prepare for the MCAT or where to take those courses, since I graduated from college six years ago.
But somehow, I decide, I’m going to make this happen, and I can’t do that while working sixty-hour weeks on Must See TV.