We’ve seen it so many times. A young, handsome man rushed into the emergency room with a gunshot wound. A flurry of white coats racing the clock: CPR, the heart zapper, the order for a scalpel. Stat! Then finally, the flatline.
This is Dr. Shoshana Ungerleider’s biggest pet peeve. Where are the TV scripts about the elderly grandmothers dying of heart failure at home? What about an episode on the daughter still grieving her father’s fatal lung cancer, ten years later?
“Acute, violent death is portrayed many, many, many times more than a natural death,” says Ungerleider, an internal medicine doctor and founder of End Well, a nonprofit focused on shifting the American conversation around death.
Don’t even get her started on all the miraculous CPR recoveries where people’s eyes flutter open and they pop out of the hospital the next day.
All these television tropes are causing real harm, she says, and ignore the complexity and choices people face at the end of life.
Yes. But also no.
Anesthesiology has a lot of parts. Antigrade amnesiacs, painkillers, muscle paralyzer, and the drugs to actually knock you out. They have to monitor vital signs to see how the drugs are behaving and keep you under for extended periods. They make sure you don’t go into respiratory arrest or vomit and asphyxiate on it.
If you are only knocking someone out with drugs, it’s not as precise and just removing the drugs is usually enough to cause them to wake up. Keeping them under for any length of time readminstering drugs will take some skill. But not to the level of an anesthesiologist, especially since they can wait and see the person wake up a little to knock them out again vs an anesthesiologist that needs them not to even wake up a little.