Tonight's ER interview is with nurse Carol Hathaway, who served County General for over six years, but left to join her husband the delectable Dr Doug Ross in Seattle.
I've been gone more years than I was there, that's a weird thought isn't it? The only doctor I still know is Abby, I kind of always keep an eye out for her, and she's sort of living my dream for me. She's done so well, not many of us nurses make the transition, there can be quite a lot of animosity between the doctors and nurses, so it's a pretty big achievement. Its something I considered doing, I even took my MCAT exams, but I couldn't get up the courage to take that next step. So like I was saying, I hardly know anyone at County now, but that doesn't mean that I don't understand what it's like for them. God, in the first screening, I was the patient, I'd taken an overdose, it's a long complicated story, and it seems an over the top reaction now. I have to say that having the cameras on you in that situation feels like such an invasion of privacy when you think about it now, but at the time I couldn't care less; in the greater scheme of things it wasn't important.
I've always felt that the nurses at County, actually probably any hospital, are the unsung heroes, it makes me smile that Haleh's still there, I remember saying to Dr Benton back when they first started to record us that she 'may not be able to cross clamp an aorta, but she has over twenty years experience in emergency medicine and if you would step of your pedestal maybe you would realise its' the nurses that make this place run', these days you could change that to over thirty years experience, but the rest is still true. The nurses do so much that you don't see, it's just not so glamorous as what the doctors and surgeons do, that's all, but they're what make the ER tick.
Even though so much is still the same an awful lot has changed at County since my time there. I think the most devastating thing to watch was Mark's death, he and Doug were really close, so when Elizabeth rang to tell us, we were so stunned, its just not right that someone that good, and caring could be taken away like that, in such a painful manner. I found it very moving that he allowed the cameras to be there at the end, you imagine that you would feel so angry that this was happening to you, that you would just want to push them away, but he didn't, and I think it was an eye opener for a lot of the viewers.
Personally, I think the cameras have become more invasive, I don't remember so much of my personal life being on show, perhaps I'm just looking at it through rose tinted glasses, but I'm sure they didn't show it to the same extent as they do now. I feel sorry, for Abby, Luka, Pratt, Ray and Neela because everything they do is dissected in public. Perhaps that's the difference, the media attention is a lot more intense. If they so much as look at each other the wrong way it's a news headline the next day. God, when Neela's husband died I heard people at the pharmacy discussing whether she was grieving enough, and wondering about how quickly she would get together with Ray, they were talking about it like it was a soap opera! It was never that bad when I was there. I remember there was some speculation when Doug and I got married and then when he left, but that was minor compared to how it would be today. They say the Internets a wonderful thing but I'm not so sure when it comes to this.
My life? It's hard to believe but the twins are 10 this year, I know so much time as passed. We're still living in our beautiful home, by the water, though Doug seems to spend half his live travelling the world as his alter ego George Clooney, being in front of the cameras at County certainly changed his career aspirations! But when he's at home its just like it was when the girls and I first joined him there. He's loving, teasing, joking, and still pretty fine to look at!