Maybe You Should Talk to Someon - Lori Gottlieb Page 0,28

present.”

Wendell nods, then pats his legs twice and stands. The session is over but I want to stay.

I feel like we just got started.

11

Goodbye, Hollywood

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