Grey's Anatomy

I am a shameless fan of Grey's Anatomy. While some of the recent subplots have not been my favorite, something about the show keeps me watching. One of the questions I get asked fairly regularly is how similar the show is to real life. Let me just start by saying even I am amazed at how accurate it is. Here are some examples:

- The residents really are becoming some of my closest friends because they are the only people who know what it is like to be on call and have a patient coding and it is up to you to keep them alive through the night.


- We practice on animals. Like it or not it is a reality in medicine and no computer can replace animals. We do a lot on computers as well, but some things just have to be done on real flesh. A couple of weeks ago on the show they practiced on pigs which is very commonly done- especially in trauma situations. We also practice on bodies donated to science. We do have a computer patient who talks, bleeds and everything else and I think his name is also Stan.

-We take the yearly ABSITE- American Board of Surgery In-Training Exam. It is in January and I am starting to study for it now. Failing the exam one year doesn't set you back a year like it did for George, but you have to do certain steps to remediate.

-The unique romantic relationships on the show isn't very common but it does happen.

-Staff yell at residents regularly. Miraculously, very little of this has been directed at me (probably because the expectations for an intern are pretty low), but my day will come. I have witnessed many very nasty interactions of this sort.

-We do have a weekly morbidity and mortality conference where you have to answer for mistakes made. The highest level resident on the service does the presentations and then the staff speaks up.

-The level of intensity on the show is real. There are times of calm and fun, but there are a lot of times very serious and pressure-filled.

-We do occasionally have a patient light a cigarette in the ICU while they are receiving supplemental oxygen. It's crazy and insanely dangerous, but I've been around when a nurse caught a patient light up.


Here are some ways where things are a little (or a lot) different:

-No one has held a grenade inside a human body before

-We haven't raised a resident from the dead after a drowning

-No one has stolen a real heart.

-We don't all go to the bars after a day at work. We do sometimes, but not everyday.

-We don't compete over patients or surgeries. At times it is actually quite the opposite- it is referred to as punting a patient to another service. We have teams which a patient is assigned to and the chief resident of that team assigns different residents to different surgeries.

-Thankfully the interns are not treated anywhere near as badly as they are on the show. We get to operate and have positive interactions with the upper level residents.

-We are on call way more than the show lets on.

-We don't just scrub in for a case to watch staff operate. Sometimes as an intern I go into a case if I have time just to watch something I haven't seen before, but we're learning how to operate and when we scrub in we are almost always actively participating.

-We're done rounding by 7:30am.

-While I feel comfortable joking around with most staff there is no way I would yell at them or get in their face about the way things were going.

-We don't sit around watching dermatologist's get facials and hand massages. If we saw it happen though we would gawk just like they did on the show. I can't say I've ever seen a dermatology resident in the hospital.

-We get along with most other residents in the hospital. There are a few specialties who are notorious for certain frustrating situations but a lot of the residents were our classmates in med school and we work together well.

-We have lives outside of medicine. We don't all live together and spend every bit of our free time together. We like having friends who aren't in medicine.


I'm sure there are a lot of other similarities and differences, but these are all I could come up with for now.