Mercy Mercy Mercy Me

Oh Mercy, what a load of crap this show is.

I don't expect medical perfection from the shows I watch, but can we please get a writer or two who have actually seen a hospital before? Please?

A particularly egregious example: old man on a respirator (on a med surg floor...) with the tubes right next to him but nothing going into his airway. The nurse goes over and turns off the monitor (not the respirator) and the man instantly flatlines (as indicated by the beeping from the machine that she just turned off) and another nurse calls out the time of death. I hope they have very good malpractice coverage.

Or another example would be the time that the med-surg nurse barges in to the ER with an ambulance patient and shouts orders only to be turned down by the ER doc who spends the rest of the two episodes as an internist.

Or the urine drug screen that told the doctor exactly how much oxycontin was in a patient's system. A urine drug screen only indicates the presence of drugs, not amount, nevermind that it isn't even specific to oxycontin. In reality, the only thing the doc would have known is that the patient had taken a percocet in the last 48 hours.

Or the guy who gets compartment syndrome which makes him spontaneously get dizzy and pass out. He wakes up after having had an emergency bka surgery, except he is in the same bed (what, they can't afford a recovery room in this hospital?) with no monitoring equipment.

Here's a great one: the master's level nurse who has never set foot on a nursing unit before.  I want to attend that university that requires no clinical or preceptorship up through a master's degree.

I also enjoyed how the nurses seemed to float wantonly between med-surg, ICU, ER, and oncology units.

Along those lines, did anybody else notice that the woman who was found unconscious in a donut shop bathroom and whose lung function was deteriorating to the point of death, was:
A) on a med-surg floor
B) with no IV
C) with no respirator
D) with no resuscitation attempt despite not having any POA or living will.  Let me tell you, if you make it your hospital policy to make unconscious people DNRs, then you are just begging for some mondo lawsuits.

Oh, and don't get me started on the needle decompression.

So why did I sit through two hours of this drivel?  Chloe.  She's cute.

Don't tell my wife.