It's About Freaking Time!

I was just watching the LOTR trilogy on cable for like the millioneth time. Okay, "watching" might be too strong of a word, but it's been on for awhile as I've been doing Saturday chores (a side note here: Bronwyn and Boaz haven't been home for 24 hours! They went to the circus with Kev's folks last night and have been there all day!).

Anyway, a commercial came on for a new "drama" starring Jada Pinkett Smith...a medical drama. I was rolling my eyes thinking, oh no...not another one! (just so you know, my hospital is absolutely nothing like Grey's Anatomy) I'm so sick of doctor shows! You've got ones in the hospital, out of the hospital, medical school, medical jerks...it's endless!

But this one is called Hawthorne, and at the last second of the commercial I caught the emphasis on RN in the title. What??? They are actually going to try this from the nurse's perspective?!! I am so excited! I wrote a paper in nursing school about how nurses are portrayed in the media. Now, granted this was like 8 years ago, but I had started out writing about another topic and when I did an "internet search" (this was before the days of Google people!), almost every single topic returned was porn! I thought, is this really how I'm going to be represented in the world?

Do you remember when ER started? Way back when I mean. The nurse, Julianna something or other, was a very strong, smart woman. Who was a nurse. Who ended up going to medical school to become a doctor. That's great and all, but why couldn't they have just left the character a nurse? What was wrong with her that way? It certainly made the show a bit more "authentic" (I use that term loosely), because I don't know when the last time you were in an emergency room, but the doctors do NOT outnumber the nurses 25 to 1!

Or what about "Meet the Parents". Such I funny movie, but half the time they were making fun of Ben Stiller's character being a "male nurse". And the only time he was given legitmacy for making the choice to be a nurse was when everyone learned that his MCAT scores were good, and he really could have been a doctor if he'd wanted to.

Well, all that to say, I'm really excited about this new show. I'm sure it won't be completely realistic, and I hope that it will not be a total soap opera where nurses are making out with patients in the bathrooms or something. I will actually be surprised if I even have time to watch it on any kind of regular basis. But I hope that it helps the rest of the world to see that nurses are not merely women who decided they couldn't cut medical school and ended up emptying bedpans. I hope that RN's are portrayed the way they should be: female or male, smart, strong, caring, willing and able to be the voice for many people who cannot speak up for themselves.