Television

It was great!

Haven't caught up that far yet. I have to watch slowly.

I never did much ER work, largely because I did enough in training to know I wasn't cut out for it.

But holy fuck has this show been both triggering and cathartic. Some episodes, I'm shaking and crying the whole damn time. But I feel better once I get it all out. Just means I can't always watch multiple episodes in the same day.

Like, back doing nursing home work and home health, I burnt out multiple times. But I loved parts of the job, so I never quit.

But at the time I didn't realize how fucking much the bad parts ate their way into me. I was very good with end of life care. It was my passion, and I miss it. But damn. Watching people die on this show brings it all back. Watching the staff/cast try to save people and not being able to. Even seeing the saves. I haven't been able to work for almost as long as I did, and the pain of it is still right there. Almost twenty damn years, you'd think the grief and the sorrow would have scarred over and be just memory.

Not when a show like that gets so close to real. Not when the actors are so fucking good at their jobs that it feels real too.

I've had memories pop back up over the last few weeks of watching that I thought had faded away. Like, the first time I was involved with a patient stroking out. I remembered that it had happened, it was a fact, but the sounds, the way his face looked, the fear in his eyes, I hadn't had those pop up in my brain in decades. But I sure as fuck saw it all again the other day. Just that mental movie replaying while watching the show, and it wasn't even a very similar event in the show.

I can't imagine what the hell someone that did any real time in emergency services would go through watching it.

I fucking broke when the scene in the second season where Dana is teaching the new nurse how to clean the recently deceased. My wife asked me something about what they said (and I won't go into much detail because spoilers), and I just started talking about the way a newly dead body smells, and that you never really get used to it, you just learn how to ignore it. Because you don't get used to it. You don't get used to the way a body feels, the sounds it makes, none of it. You just learn to find peace in it, find a form of acceptance that you're giving them that one last service, one final thing you can do. Well, I experienced it that way, maybe other people do get used to it and it's no different than other things you get used to when taking care of people.

Oh! And the actress that plays Dana? Damn. Just damn. She reminds me of so many nurses I worked under over the years. I don't know if the actress has experience in nursing or what, but she nails it.

Don't get me wrong, there's flaws. Not everything is exactly realistic, not every detail holds up. But they really managed to capture the emotions of it all.

They have to launch the dark side show now, just so there's more.