Both Garfield and McKinley probably would have survived if they been wounded after WWII. Ronald Reagan was much more seriously injured than either of the two of them.
One funny example of this is the made-for-TV movie Birds of Prey with David Janssen. It must have really been on a tight budget, because when the bad guys spoke, the camera was always on the other guy not speaking. I guess that meant that per union rules they weren’t actors with speaking roles, so they got paid less.
My Mom was in her late 80’s when she got pneumonia and was hospitalized. I asked the doctor how long she had if she got better.
Doc: Two years
Me: What if she lives past those two years?
Doc: Two years
Me: After every two years she continues to live, the answer is two years?
Doc: Yes
That’s when I realized and asked the doctor that if his estimate is just based on statistics and he had yes and laughed.
A year and a half later my Mom was in the emergency room because she had stopped eating. I wanted to take her home, she was in a care home, and the doctor said she may not make it through the night. She returned to the care home and passed away in the early afternoon the next day.
In one of the season finales of Doc Martin, he has to stop Louisa from getting on a plane because an anuerysm in her brain might pop at altitude. Instead of getting on the phone and telling the airport authorities to detain her, he hops in the car and drives there, arriving in the nick of time. All the while, I was screaming “Get on the phone, goddammit, you can treat her after she’s been taken off the plane!”
Sadly, that reminds me of several real-life situations I’ve known, where people tried to drive relatives or friends to the hospital, and either didn’t make it, or the person suffered irreversible damage on the trip.
Call. An. Ambulance.
The EMT can do lifesaving procedures, and transfer the patient in stable condition.
When my son was 4, he had croup, and started gasping for breath. We called 911. An ambulance was there in 3 min, 24 seconds. Yes, I was watching the clock, while comforting my son, and encouraging him to keep taking breaths, and listen to the siren getting louder.
An EMT immediately put him on oxygen, while another prepared a steroid inhalant treatment. They put a pulse oximeter on his finger, which registered an alarming 72, but immediately started to rise.
After 10 minutes, during which they also gave him some oral medication, he traveled, relaxed and comfortable on oxygen, to the hospital. His pulse ox was 98.
He is fine, and never had a recurrence.
If we’d tried to drive him ourselves, I have no doubt that if he’d made it, he would have had brain or lung damage.
Nobody on TV ever calls am ambulance, though (Emergency!`excepted). People try to drive to the hospital themselves, and if they get stopped for speeding, instead of the cop saying “Let me call you an ambulance,” he gives them an escort.
I wonder if, IRL, a cop would get in trouble for doing that.
I know some people think they can’t afford an ambulance, and don’t realize how much EMTs can do, but I’ll bet if TV didn’t show so many civilians speeding to the hospital, and more people calling ambulances, it would happen more often. [/soapbox]
One of the things I’m grateful that my late spouse did for me was that when I developed anaphyllaxis he cut through the dithering of the assembled crowd and called an ambulance. They were able to start treating me the moment they arrived and that may well be the reason I’m alive today. For darn sure no one at the party had medication or bottled oxygen.
There are stories of people getting ridiculous charges from ambulance services (or from helicopter ambulance services), or from emergency departments outside their insurance network. The screwed-up healthcare insurance system in the US may have given people the wrong idea.
I got a ridiculous charge from an ambulance service once, from a city where I was not resident, but happened to get into a car accident. Apparently local taxes supported the service, so they were for people in the county, but not “outsiders.”
I’m not sure why my health insurance hadn’t paid them, unless they found the “not for outsiders” as ridiculous as I did. I referred them to my auto insurance, and never heard from them again. My rates did not go up.
According to the histories I’ve read, the instrument Alexander Graham Bell used did NOT locate the bullet because throughout the examination the president was lying on a mattress with steel coil springs.
The reason for this: simple economics. You have the characters call an ambulane, that means two more roles to cast and pay, one of which is likely a speaking role. Plus you probably need a physical ambulance, and other props. You have a regular character drive another one to the hospital, you don’t have any additional expenses.
But I agree with you.
That sounds right. It would likely have worked, had they let him do it correctly. My bad memory strikes!
You mean an old-fashioned lab coat? Double-breasted with a standing collar? Now often known as a “mad-scientist jacket”?
I guess there’s some resemblance to a Nehru jacket, in that it has a standing collar, but otherwise I wouldn’t call them the same thing.
I think the reference was more to one of these?
But yes, every health care professional I’ve run into for the last 40 years have worn just a conventional current style labcoat or lab jacket. Or an actual patient-handling gown/scrubs.
You can still get them. Most companies list them as “dental smocks”, so they are apparently more popular among dentists than in other fields of medicine.
I think they are still commonly worn in some Asian countries. As are the old-school white nurses uniforms.
That’s definitely what my dentist wore when I was a kid. Dentists need something closer-fitting than other doctors, because they lean over more, I suspect. However, since HIV, dentists IME have been changing disposables in between patients, so I don’t even know what they wear underneath.
The last couple of times I’ve been in hospitals as a patient, nursing students have had to wear uniforms as well as their hats. There was something a little creepy about it, since you see them mostly in horror movies anymore. Actual, which is to say, graduated and accredited nurses wear scrubs, not just for comfort, but because they are easy to change, and forgiving on size so you can change several times a day if you get fluids on them.
My wife and I enjoyed the series The Affair on Showtime. Much of the action in the earlier seasons took place in Manhattan and Montauk, Long Island. Characters would travel between the two locations regularly.
Montauk has the most amazing train schedule of any place I have ever seen. Whenever a character arrived at the station, they just got on a train. Unless, of course, the plot required them to talk to someone while waiting on the train. Then, the railroad was kind enough to hold the train until they completed their conversation.
There was never any checking of a timetable, purchasing a ticket, or any other ordinary thing involved in traveling by train. I don’t travel by train a lot, but I have done it, including around metro New York City. I always thought it was important to know where the train was going.
In their defense, Montauk is at the end of that line, so every departing train is going in the direction of Jamaica (and the majority continue to Penn Station).
Of course that still does not explain how there is always a timely train ready to go or about to pull in.
My brother’s TA at UT was Neil deGrasse. FWIW
Probably a different scenario than what you mean, but I spent 8 years as an EMT. Over that time, I had police escorts to the hospital on many occasions. They tended to drive in front of us, and pull off briefly to block an intersection so that the cross traffic wouldn’t just accelerate when their light turned green. Once we passed the intersection, they’d pull off to get back in front of us for the next intersection.
Blocking/escorting for a civilian’s car, though? I don’t recall ever having seen that.