Comments on: Malpractice: Getting Medical Facts Right in Fiction

By: Lizzi Tremayne

Lizzi Tremayne — Fri, 18 Aug 2017 04:28:37 +0000

Thanks for all this, I appreciate it 100%. I’m an equine vet, so I appreciate it on two different levels…as a vet, and as a horsey person. 🙂 Thanks so much!
xx
Lizzi Tremayne

By: Top Picks Thursday! For Writers & Readers 08-17-2017 | The Author Chronicles

Thu, 17 Aug 2017 17:01:37 +0000

[…] Even a writer of contemporary fiction must do some world-building—no author can escape it completely. Meg McNulty has 3 ways to build a fantasy world, while Cait Reynolds tells us how to get medical facts right in fiction. […]

By: Icy Sedgwick

Icy Sedgwick — Tue, 15 Aug 2017 19:21:41 +0000

I feel awful because I had a patient wake up and not remember why she was in a hospital bed but it was steampunk and a Wolverine-type scenario! But I try to avoid things like this precisely because I don’t know anything about hospitals aside from visiting other people in them. So this post is brilliant for anyone who, quite frankly, just doesn’t know!

By: Kate

Kate — Sat, 12 Aug 2017 20:24:04 +0000

I grew up in a hospital. My mother was an ICU nurse for 20 years, and used me as the designated visitor for teens and children whose families lived too far away to allow them to visit as often as they would have liked. I spent a lot of time sitting at the nursing station listening to the nurses talk about patients and how their attitude often affected the level of attention they would receive. Make no mistake, all received the same level of nursing care, but some would get the extras, like being offered a sandwich at midnight, or an extra back rub to enable sleep. One topic that I found especially interesting was which doctor they would choose for a given procedure, and which one they would not let touch them for anything more complicated than bandaging a paper cut.

I am also a frequent flyer in both the ER and OR, having received my first major surgery at 15. Three more abdominal surgeries found me in adulthood and missing a goodly number of nonessential interior parts.

I chose to live a nontraditional life, having careers in the military, law enforcement, and finally as a professional driver. Trips to the ER are not uncommon in any of these fields, and I had several. Auto accidents that should have killed me, and being run over by a horse that I was training were the ones that also required trips to the OR.

Your description of ER procedures was most accurate. Both my brother and myself tend to perceive medical dramas as comedy, but the script writers must make each episode interesting, or people will change the channel. The evening news and your daily paper subscribe to the same theory. Drama gains an audience. “Pit Bull Attacks Child”, will draw far more viewers, despite the fact that the dog inflicted a barely reportable scratch while taking the stick that the child was beating him with away from him. Across town, the six year old girl who had her face nearly ripped off by a stray Cocker Spaniel did not even earn a paragraph in the paper.

Keep up the good work. As a novelist, I try to create dramatic scenes as accurately as possible, and it is refreshing to learn that I am on the right track. Thank you for sharing your knowledge.

By: Bonnie McKeegan

Bonnie McKeegan — Sat, 12 Aug 2017 03:11:37 +0000

I fear the Wrath of the Red Pen! But, I am so glad for your post! My story contains medical scenes…. so, after the creative phase is over I’ll be sure to go back and review/correct and do more research if needed! I bookmarked this post too! Thank you 😉

By: R Coots

R Coots — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 12:55:38 +0000

Ah, good info. My mom has been a nurse (ER) mainly, for thirty years now and some of the knowledge has come over by osmosis. Some hasn’t. One thing to mention though, is things might be different in a small town hospital. Ours for example, had right beds…Total. Including ER for the really bad days. There was no calling for Cardiology or this or that other department. Unledd there were patients needing a close eye, there wasn’t even a doctor in the hospital side of the building. They stayed on call, in town, waiting for something to happen. I got a fishhook through my face in grade school and they were able to do basic clean up, but the doc had been down the beach fishing at the same time, so he had to make it in before they could stitch me up.

Just an example. 🙂

By: excessivelyperky

excessivelyperky — Fri, 11 Aug 2017 04:05:45 +0000

I read PDR’s for fun drug interactions to make my characters suffer. And I have to say yay for the Warm blankets (they have them at dialysis clinics, too, where my husband goes). I once spent an instructive hour at a military base ER (nosebleed caused by a bad softball hop wouldn’t stop bleeding) listening to an MP discuss just what the alcohol blood test showed to the car wreck person on the other side of the thin partition (I take my entertainment when I can), and glad it wasn’t me. I also give people idiosyncratic drug reactions, having learned that my mother-in-law’s metabolism interpreted Valium as speed. I’m horrible to my fantasy characters, too–let’s see, there’s the burn victim who ended up addicted to his pain meds, the ruling lady with exciting OB/GYN problems, the young hero dealing with mild neural deficits from when he fell off the horse and whanged his head, the mentor with the serious drinking problem…God, I love it.

By: kim alexander

kim alexander — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 16:14:34 +0000

Nice work as always! One thing that grinds my gears is using asthma as a plot point. If you have asthma that’s serious enough for it to BECOME a plot point, you are almost certainly on maintenance inhalers, and you carry a rescue inhaler with you at all times which you will rarely need. This is particularly infuriating when the subject is a child. (The worst I can think of off the top of my head was the movie Signs.) (If your plot is set pre-80’s ignore what I just said, the meds were revolutionized at that time.)

By: Maureen Howard

Maureen Howard — Thu, 10 Aug 2017 06:48:36 +0000

Hi Cait, I really enjoyed reading this.
I am an Australian GP and also a writer, as is my sister, and we always cringe at the unrealistic hospital/ER shows where everyone is running around shouting orders and rushing form patient to patient giving haphazard treatment etc. If they did that all the time they would be too exhausted to work, they’d make a lot of mistakes and either they or the patients would drop dead.
My sister and I always find errors in TV shows. There is a good retro Aussie drama show called Love Child, about unmarried mothers in the 60s and early 70s. It is quite realistic in most aspects eg fashion, music, treatment of girls etc.
But I got annoyed when they started talking about doing urine pregnancy tests, which I knew were not done then.
Another episode showed them doing an obstetric ultrasound, in 1972. I knew that we did not use ultrasound here till 1976, mainly because I trained in the hospital where it was first introduced, and also because I had my son in 1973, in the same hospital, and we had not heard of ultrasound then, apart from in experimental use. There is another popular TV show in which they were talking about oral Sabin (polio) vaccine being used, in 1960, and I knew it did not arrive in Australia till 1966!
Writers need to know that if they make errors, some of which are glaring errors of fact, a reader/viewer will easily spot the mistake. I suspect some writers are very young, and do not do their research correctly. We recently judged a short memoir writing competition, and found that an entry we thought would come second had an error of fact, which we only noticed on the second reading. However we realised it would stand out when read aloud at the presentation day, so it was not placed.
I’m sorry to hear you’ve had such an awful health experience, and hope things are improving for you. Your knowledge of hospitals and medical procedures is spot on!

By: Elizabeth Drake

Elizabeth Drake — Wed, 09 Aug 2017 22:51:31 +0000

Deepest sympathies to you on your medical struggles.

I appreciate you sharing this. I don’t watch ER or Grey’s Anatomy or any other of these medical shows partially because my husband works in a hospital. I remember we were watching some episode and they were talking about how rare something was and impossible to cure.

DH rolled his eyes and said they’d had a medical conference on that two weeks ago. Yeah, it was somewhat rare, but there were ways to treat it and they doctors were discussing treatment options for an unusual case that hadn’t responded to conventional treatment.

I turned the show off. Haven’t put on a medical drama since. 🙂