Reality and TV

If you missed last night's season finale of Grey's Anatomy, you missed a pretty chilling episode. And for me, it was a really uncomfortable look at what could have been, when I was still working at Medical City. We used to have to drill for just those types of events and after the show was over, all that stuff came flooding back to me. My office was on the 7th floor of Building D--the top floor--right next to the Newborn Nursery. While we never had a shooter, we had some pretty tense situations between estranged new mom's and dad's, estranged families, and baby kidnappers (an unsuccessful one walked in right behind me early one morning according to Security video). And then there's just the plain old crazy people. While I never saw a gun on anyone, I know the ER staff saw them on a regular basis from rival gang members to revenge hunters. I used to hear Code Purple (aggressive person) called overhead fairly often and was glad my office had an outer door leading to it, that could be LOCKED. And you thought hospitals were just for sick people. Well.....yes and no.

I remember after one big upper management staff meeting being told that if we ever had to go on lock down, it would most likely be from a deliberately planted terrorist's biohazard, and we might not be the only hospital attacked. And we were most likely going to die--and no one was leaving. We could call home and say our goodbyes, but that was it. We'd just be taking the contamination with us, to kill our families and friends. We were even shown the slides depicting the likelihood of it happening and where we fell on the top ten list. Since I don't remember our exact number, let's just say it was in the top 5. Yeah....try drinking your coffee at the meeting after that revelation. I remember thinking, well, who in here do I really like and would be fun to die with, if it comes to that? And oddly enough, there were several people that I decided made the cut. And not one was a doctor.

I decided when all was said and done and I couldn't help another living soul, I was going to head for the Pharmacy, with my like minded posse, and have one last Kool Aid party. Hey...we could have made it fun, and it sure beat the alternative.

Scary? You bet. Could it be reality ? No question.