How are you feeling today? Itchy? Tired? More tired than usual? What did you eat yesterday? What have you eaten today? When’s the last time you drank a full glass of water?
A few nights ago I woke up with significant armpit pain, which you will learn in Hypochondria 101 is the worst place to wake up with significant pain. The armpits contain lymph nodes. Lymph nodes bring only bad news. They’re the human check engine light.
I conferred with WebMD, that most confidential of healthcare providers, and learned that I would be fine if the area wasn’t hard or swollen. I conferred with my girlfriend, who told me I slept with my arms straight up last night. The pain subsided the next day. Muscle strain.
Everybody needs some circle of trust or mental exercise for alleviating medical anxiety, because at the end of the day the universal wellness program is to hope nothing goes wrong. An earlier edition of me believed that the main thing doctors did all day was cure people. I imagined doctors were blessed healers, who turned sick people into well people in the same way an assembly line turns sugar and raw plastic into Coca-Cola.
I don’t blame myself for dreaming up this archetype. Grey’s Anatomy, ER, The Resident, Chicago Med, The Good Doctor, House — these stories contributed to my vision of doctors as healers, but I don’t blame them either. Medical dramas are not educational. They’re hardly medical. Like every other story, they tell us something about the way we wish our heroes worked: efficiently, brilliantly, fueled by sex and black coffee. Like every other story, they want us to imagine that they are the few, and we are the many, and thank god for that.
Medical dramas, legal dramas, police procedurals — any story that depicts any profession at all — are often judged with respect to realism. You’ll find this obsession in any number of YouTube videos with titles like “Ex-Hitman Reacts” and “Lion Expert Rates 9 Big-Cat Attacks in Movies.” And I’ve watched plenty of these videos. It’s fun career trivia! But do we imagine that one TV show is better than another if its surgeons wear full face masks?
If we really wanted to observe hyperrealistic behavior, there are plenty of park benches to sit on. Really, we’re fine if dialogue in a drama is dramatic, or if the producers take the headrests out to get a better shot of the actors. We’re fine if no two surgeons have the same name, even though there were at least a dozen Ryans in my graduating class. We don’t bring critical faculties to artwork automatically.
On the other hand, medical dramas aren’t pure theater. Even the very first medical procedural, City Hospital (1952-53), was lauded in its day for evading the “hackneyed use of the hospital setting for theatrical purposes.” Audiences wanted to feel like drama somehow characterized the real work of doctors and surgeons. What do they do all day? What do we wish they did all day?
In House, every episode confronts the main cast with a mystery disease. The doctors deliberate, and return with some rare condition or confluence of conditions. Cracks in the workday are filled with troublesome patients, internal struggle, and conversations which alter the trajectory of minor characters’ lives. Important work is done here.
Is there another profession, similarly life-changing, with similar duties? Dr. House, the prickly but brilliant but Vicodin-addicted diagnostician, lives at 221b Baker Street. Wilson is his less brilliant but emotionally streetwise partner. It’s a Sherlock Holmes thing. There’s a wiki about it, go nuts.
Once you start looking for parallels between the detective series and the medical drama, you’ll find them everywhere. Watch one of the many episodes in which a wife — and invariably, it is the wife — poisons her husband. Doctors become detectives completely seamlessly, usually confronting the culprit themselves as though vested with any kind of legal authority.
Both genres thrive on this assumption that if there is a mystery, there is a solution, and that solution is derivable through obvious but at-first-disconnected clues. Only that solution is possible from the given clues. Only the lead characters could have solved it. And once we've identified the disease, the cure is easy. Knowing the problem is the same thing as solving it.
Stories described by this format reveal a popular way of thinking about high-stakes professions. No one is clambering for a culinary procedural, because at the end of the day it doesn’t matter to me all that much if the delivery guy brought ten pounds of beef or 100. Were I brutally murdered, however, I sure hope someone would figure that out. Were I truly sick, I would want my symptoms to identify my disease as surely as a fingerprint.
Of course, fingerprints aren’t actually hard evidence. Neither is DNA. And, I’ll cut to the chase here, most murders aren’t solved! Whatever you imagine detectives do for most of the day, it’s not solving murders.
There are places where we won’t accept doubt: hospitals, police precincts, laboratories, battlefields, courtrooms. We preoccupy ourselves by telling stories about the people who dwell there, and those people in those stories are nothing like us. We are error-prone, generally sleepy, and we wish we were somewhere else when we’re at work.
That couldn’t possibly be true of our doctors and detectives. They can’t be like us. Right?
I’ve had two milestone medical events in my life, not counting when I was born.
One was an actual ER visit, about which the less said the better, but a grown man referred to my stomach as my tummy (I was 22) and the most important person in my life was briefly a billing clerk who signed me up to receive charity.
The other time — this would have been my sophomore year of college or so — I went to see the university clinic about a thing on my toe. Broad strokes here: it was sort of slimy, it hurt, and by the time I walked in I had convinced myself we would need to amputate.
Let me slow down here for a second, because what you may have just heard was, “I was very afraid vis a vis the toe thing.” But that’s not what I said. I said I thought we would need to amputate. Years removed from that scenario, I realize how horrifyingly flippant that is to actual amputees. But at the time, and in the state of mind I was in, I thought of going to the doctor as a formality along the road to having my foot cut off. I wanted it to happen.
So, I went. I drank coffee from a styrofoam cup and watched HGTV. A receptionist tapped me on the shoulder and urged me to check the box that said “I cannot pay for this,” because in reality I couldn’t pay for it. I said ingrown toenail so I didn’t sound crazy, even though in reality I was sort of crazy.
I sat in the chair, then on the examination table, then paced, then played on my phone because it seemed the most natural. I considered whether I would be grave or casual about the whole thing, and settled on casual.
The doctor entered. She instructed me to “peel off a sock.” When I did, and when I saw the blemish so small at the very end of my leg, I wanted to cry. She poked it, and it didn’t hurt, but I wanted it to hurt. She left the room to go and get a magnifying glass, and I laughed. I laughed and laughed and laughed.
In dramas, our problems are exactly as big as we expect them to be. The people that solve those problems are exactly as equipped as we yearn for them to be. Doctors cure. Wounds never heal on their own. This is true of the dramas in our screens, and the ones in our heads.
You know what show consistently, famously ranks among medical professionals as the most accurate depiction of the field? Scrubs. I have no idea whether they pronounce diphtheria correctly, or if anyone even says diphtheria in the runtime of the show. No one is, to my knowledge, held at gunpoint and asked to diagnose amid a hostage crisis.
The doctors of Scrubs drink cheap beer in a small apartment. Patients die inexplicably, offscreen. Residents begin orientation with a lesson on avoiding malpractice suits (not avoiding malpractice, necessarily). The show presents the inner life of doctors. Its theme song goes, “I’m no Superman.”
We want doctors to be detectives, because we think detectives solve things. Solving things is desirable, because solving a problem is the same as curing it. But I think a society in which the most common murder weapon is an icicle, and every case of cottonmouth belies a rare tumor, and every town in America sooner or later experiences a large-scale bank robbery — I think a society like that would fall apart instantly. God, imagine House’s billing department.
Our preoccupation with solution-finding stems from the rock solid assumption that we can always identify the problem, but sometimes — most of the time, probably — the doctor’s job is to gently explain that nothing is wrong, that the only blessed healer is time, and then to kiss it and make it better.
When the chips are down, we need detectives. When they aren’t, we need effective communicators, someone to gently talk us away from our imagination. And everyone is capable of gentleness. Empathy is the ground state, not an outside force. Not everyone, on the other hand, knows the diagnostic tests for heavy metal poisoning.
I’m not anti-doctor, for whatever that’s worth. It wouldn’t hit the same to grovel at the feet of some random streetcar passenger asking, “Will I be okay??,” as it would to grovel at the feet of someone with a notarized document saying they’ve heard this shit before. But so fiercely celebrating the few tricks us into believing that we need them more than we need the many. I think most people have most problems, and most problems appear larger in the mirrors of our minds.
The toe thing story is funny because, actually, it wasn’t an ingrown toenail. The doctor was wrong — but I still hold them in high esteem because of something they told me, a heuristic for self-diagnosis: “Good things get better, bad things don’t.” I repeat that to myself daily or weekly, all the time. I repeated it when I woke up with armpit pain, and in the back of the car while my friends drove me to the hospital. It is the best prognosis I’ve ever received, the best one I can imagine.
Good things get better, bad things don’t.
What I’m having fun with lately
Baldur’s Gate 3. I dunno what to tell you man, but I haven’t mainlined a video game this hard since deep, deep into lockdown. It’s actually not a genre of game I like very much, but I managed to subdue myself into enjoying it, which is something I would actually love to write about.
The Bear season two. We finally finished this week, it’s an all-timer. The season finale goes on the short list for art that’s made me jump up, walk circles around the room, then pick up all the fast food wrappers around me out of pure momentum. See also: Veronica Mars, Words of Radiance, and Life Is Strange.
Z, hilariously. A good friend and Supernormal reader dipped into the albums I posted in my last essay, which included SZA’s Ctrl and My Morning Jacket’s Z. Little did I know SZA also has an album called Z, which is also fantastic, so this recommendation is brought to you by pure chance.
Bottoms, which is really just extremely good. Ayo Edebiri brings so much to that sort of antsy, sort of twee niche I associate with Elliot Page — meaning she has the potential to become one of the coolest people of all time.
The Sixth Sense and Oldboy, which are both masterpieces or whatever so let’s not dwell on it. Except, The Sixth Sense is such an interesting viewing if you care about the experience of watching movies post- or pre- spoiler.
Turns out there’s a quesabirria truck a block from my apartment. I ordered some tacos and the guy said, very diplomatically, “That’s not what you want, this other menu item is what you actually meant to order.” Bless.
Thanks for reading!
I don’t do a lot of exorting, but hey, if you liked this piece you should totally subscribe. And if you are subscribed, rather than upgrading to paid, you should totally exploit a bond of trust to get someone you know to subscribe. Either way, I’ve been feeling the support for Supernormal and it means a ton, so double thanks.
DR
There is a culinary procedural! It’s Chinese, called Chef Hua, and you’ll never be hungrier watching tv.
man why u gotta do house dirty like that by showing him doing the "mom said it's my turn on the xbox" pose