Since I’ve Gotten So Many Emails Asking…

… what I think of NBC’s new EMS show Trauma, I’ll give you my standard opinion on such things:

If it gets me laid more often, I’m all for it.

Problem is, anyone likely to be impressed by this dreck isn’t likely to be anyone I’d want to sleep with anyway.

Let’s see what it Trauma has to offer, shall we?

• Characters so thinly drawn, they’re even labeled in the trailer (The Father, The Fighter, The Rebel…). All that’s missing is the Social Outcast Who Becomes A Valuable Member Of The Team Because of His Mad Tech Skilz.
• Overwrought drama. “The fighter” even exhorts her cardiac arrest patient to “Come back to me, honey!” Which he promptly does, then mouths “thank you” around his oral airway, complete with profoundly grateful facial expression. Straight outta Compton prolonged cardiac arrest, even!
• Totally implausible scenarios: Uninjured mothers riding in the EMS helicopter alongside their critically injured son? Really? And while we’re at it, medical helicopters in San Francisco?
• Three helicopter crashes in a 3.5 minute trailer. Actually, this is the only part of Trauma that remotely approaches the reality of EMS.

Meh. Color me monumentally unimpressed.

If you want to see a better representation of EMS, go read Epijunky’s posts, Fan of Her Life, Part 1 and Part 2.

She cries for her patients (sometimes more than she should), she questions her skills (sometimes more than she should), and she wishes all the while that she were saving lives and stamping out disease doing 911 calls, rather than doing the interfacility transfer shuffle.

And through it all, her humanity shines through. She sees her patients as people, not as bit players in her personal adrenaline drama.

Would that more EMTs saw their patients this way. Television shows like Trauma aren’t going to draw people like that to our profession, unfortunately.