Curious

I was followed on a slow night by Trauma: Life in the ER about 10 years or so back when I worked at UMC in Las Vegas. By slow I mean my patient had a potato in his butt was the most exciting thing that came in that night.

But since that's a 'family' show, the whole 5-6 hours they followed me and my patient was cut down to the ED Doc standing in front of the guys X-ray showing said potato on the film saying "Yeah we get people in here all the time with foreign bodies, vegetative matter."

Here in Germany I've (a lot of us) have been shadowed by both US and European TV crews doing stories on wounded troops and I've been on German news twice. It's not really exciting, sometimes they're in the way and you have to constantly watch that they don't contaminate anything while in the OR suite, I don't care much for it as I'm SO not photogenic and look like a whale on film - thank goodness I'm wearing a mask so only myself and the people that know me would recognize me.

A Dr. I work for was on Mystery Diagnosis.They came to our office and filmed the scenes of the patient getting care. They were very nice and asked lots of questions to get accurate information. It was fun seeing it on TV.

I've had film crews in a few times in ER's that I've worked. I think they just get in the way. The low acuity patients and the visitors like getting in the way so they can get on camera. The nurses have to duck out of the way and take roundabout ways to get the job done to avoid the crew. And what's really annoying is that the TV producers only show what they like and give a stilted view of what is real. It's all sensationalism.