Ridiculous medical mistakes on TV

Nurses Humor

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Specializes in SICU, trauma, neuro.

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CCJ21016

7 Posts

It drives me crazy when I see all these people getting IV injections in some random place in the arm (and sometimes neck) with the syringe at a 90 degree angle! Really? Has no one on the set ever had their blood taken? Maybe it's easier to film...I don't know.

sevensonnets

975 Posts

Or when a patient goes berserk and is fighting the nurses and someone comes in with a gigantic syringe and plunges it into the patient's neck. They're out cold in 3 seconds flat!

CCJ21016

7 Posts

Or when a patient goes berserk and is fighting the nurses and someone comes in with a gigantic syringe and plunges it into the patient's neck. They're out cold in 3 seconds flat!

See, this kind of thing is why so many internet experts think you can just dart an animal and he or she will just drop. Huuuuge personal pet peeve.

Ruby Vee, BSN

17 Articles; 14,030 Posts

Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
Television CPR restores conciousness.

In cases of asystole, successful resuscitation will be indicated by the patient Waking The Heck Up.

In fact, why do they even call it CPR? They should just shout: "He's coding! We need to Wake Him The Heck Up, STAT!"

The clinical signs of Waking the Heck Up are a sudden sitting-up movement and a deep inhalation.

And yet.... never quite sudden enough to head-butt the chump who was hunched over the patient, giving chest compressions.

I live for the day that happens....

It's probably on the outtakes reel!

Ruby Vee, BSN

17 Articles; 14,030 Posts

Specializes in CCU, SICU, CVSICU, Precepting & Teaching.
Or when a patient goes berserk and is fighting the nurses and someone comes in with a gigantic syringe and plunges it into the patient's neck. They're out cold in 3 seconds flat!

Dang, I wish it really worked like that! Would have saved me some wrestling injuries.

Extra Pickles

1,403 Posts

Just saw an old episode of Charmed in which two detectives are in the bedroom of a dead woman. She is sprawled across the bed, fully dressed in nightclothes, untouched.

The cause of her death is unknown to the detectives because it's one of those supernatural Died In Her Dream things lol but here comes the best line ever, delivered by one of the cops, "the coroner said she broke every bone in her body, as though she had fallen 20 stories". Coroner?? Clinical impressions? for the woman fully clothed still sprawled across the bed?? omg funny.

My favorite was the movie Million Dollar Baby with Hillary Swank. She's lying in bed, trached and vented and she starts talking!

Also! Watch the old thriller Alien, the original one. When the alien guy explodes, his guts are Foley catheters with the balloons inflated.

Lrive021

1 Post

I watch a lot of Grey's and some of my favourites include showing up in emerg with a PA cath and Art line on the monitor but nowhere in sight. Another one would definitely be defibing asystole. I literally can't contain myself for that one. Others include not donning and dofting PPE properly. Come on guys, you're surgeons, you do this every day. Which reminds me, they never seem to be in the OR. Our surgeons are there like 90% of the time at least and barely acknowledge the world outside of the OR.

n6medjim

10 Posts

NCIS: whoever gets shot, it's almost always in the upper left chest just barely subclavian ... and dies instantly. Yuppers. Deader than can be!

kataraang, BSN

129 Posts

Specializes in critical care ICU.
I watch a lot of Grey's and some of my favourites include showing up in emerg with a PA cath and Art line on the monitor but nowhere in sight. Another one would definitely be defibing asystole. I literally can't contain myself for that one. Others include not donning and dofting PPE properly. Come on guys, you're surgeons, you do this every day. Which reminds me, they never seem to be in the OR. Our surgeons are there like 90% of the time at least and barely acknowledge the world outside of the OR.
Lol I saw the defib in asystole as well. Well, as I have been taught, if you're pushing meds and pushing meds, with no response...it can't hurt to defib. It may be a very fine v fib that the monitor isn't displaying. But I did pick up on that immediately after seeing.
Pediatric Critical Care Columnist

NotReady4PrimeTime, RN

5 Articles; 7,358 Posts

Specializes in NICU, PICU, PCVICU and peds oncology.

How To Get Away with Murder had a really fine one in the season finale. Laurel had been hauled out of Annaliese's house with smoke inhalation and was brought in comatose and intubated. She starts coming around after hearing Maggie saying, "I know this woman!" Right away there's all this gurgling and coughing noise emanating from her still-intubated trachea as she's trying to sit up. Strike one. They pull the tube immediately. Strike two. She's completely lucid and whispers, "Wes!" The room is full of looky-loos who are NOT family but all of whom know that her beta hCG was positive. Strike 3.

Like all the rest of you, the bent-elbow CPR always makes me laugh. Why, in the name of all that's holy, don't they use a mannequin for the actual compressions? Most of the time, other than seeing the compressor putting hands on the chest right at the beginning, the arresting patient isn't even in view, just the compressor's head bobbing up and down to the beat of Stayin' Alive. Our sim mannequin looks pretty reall from several feet away.

As a former ECMO specialist, the scenes with ECMO just make me groan and roll my eyes. Oh yes, let's cannulate a patient who is trapped under a fallen beam so that when the beam is lifted and is no longer tamponading the huge hole in the patient's chest, there's still circulation. Cannulating in a elevator was another fave. Keeping a patient on ECMO in the ER... Just. Does. Not. Happen.

And then there are the episodes that have patient's expiring in seconds once their "life support" has been withdrawn. Yes, there are certain patients who will die quickly once their pressors are stopped, but it's often minutes to hours. Sometimes days. I was in a situation once where we had extubated a young boy who had severe neurological deficits from birth. He had suffered a cardiac arrest in his medical foster home where surprisingly nobody knew CPR ) and was pulseless for at least the 6 minutes it too the first responders to arrive. His biological family and his foster family were all crowded around the bed when we extubated, and they all seemed to be leaning in just a smidge, expecting him to do what we've all seen a million times on TV... sigh and die. When he continued to breathe, their faces told the tale... even though I had told them all more than once that it wasn't going to be like they saw on TV, they were shocked. He continued to breathe for another 10 months.

Mainstream media must be entertaining to keep their audiences, but they're doing all of us a disservice by continually allowing these flagrantly inaccurate portrayals of life and death to exist.

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