Viewing Single Post From: Seasons 1 thru 7

Viewing Single Post From: Seasons 1 thru 7 - VoiceOvers
oncetherewasaway	Nov 20 2008, 04:51 PM
McEditor Posts: 1,625 Group: .Grey Girls. Member #23 Joined: October 25, 2006	Season 5 5.01 ~ 5.02 – Dream a Little Dream of Me We all remember the bedtime stories of our childhoods. The shoe fits Cinderella, the frog turns into a prince, Sleeping Beauty is awakened with a kiss. Once upon a time, and then they lived happily ever after. Fairy tales, the stuff of dreams. The problem is, fairy tales don't come true. It's the other stories, the ones that begin with 'dark and stormy nights' and end in the unspeakable. It's the nightmares that always seem to become reality. The person who invented the phrase 'happily ever after' should have his a.ss kicked so hard! Once upon a time, happily ever after. The stories we tell are the stuff of dreams. Fairy tales don't come true. Reality is much stormier. Much murkier. Much scarier. Reality. It's so much more interesting than living happily ever after. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.03 – Here Comes the Flood As surgeons we are trained to fix what’s broken. The breaking point is our starting line.... at work. But in our lives, the breaking point is a sign of weakness. And we’ll do everything we can to avoid it. Bones break. Organs burst. Flesh tears. We can sew the flesh, repair the damage, ease the pain. But when life breaks down ... when we break down, there’s no science... no hard and fast rules. We just have to feel our way through. And to a surgeon there’s nothing worse and there’s nothing better. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.04 – Brave New World In 6500BC, some guy looked at his sick friend and said "I have an idea. Why don't I drill a hole in your skull? It'll make you feel better." Thus, surgery was born. It takes a certain brand of crazy to come up with an idea like drilling into somebody's skull, but, surgeons have always been a confident bunch. We usually know what we're doing, and when we don't we still act like we do. We walk boldly into undiscovered country, plant a flag and start ordering people around. It's invigorating... and terrifying. We like to think we're fearless, eager to explore unknown lands and soak up new experiences. But the fact is, we're always terrified. Maybe the terror is part of the attraction - some people go to horror movies... we cut things open... dive into dark water. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.05 – There's No 'I' in Team I am a rock. I am an island. That’s the mantra of pretty much every surgeon I’ve ever met. We like to think we’re independent, loners, mavericks.... that all we need to do our job is an OR, a scalpel and a willing body. But the truth is, not even the best of us can do it alone. Surgery, like life, is a team sport. And eventually you have to get off the bench and decide what team are you batting for. The thing about choosing teams in real life, it’s nothing like it used to be in gym class. Being first pick can be terrifying and being chosen last isn’t the worst thing in the world. So we watch from the sidelines, clinging to our isolation. Because we know as soon as we let go of the bench, someone comes along and changes the game completely. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.06 – Life During Wartime For a surgeon, every patient is a battlefield. There are terrain where we advance, retreat, try to remember all the lands. And just when you think you’ve won the battle, made the world safe again along comes another landmine. Some wars are never over. Some end in an uneasy truce. Some wars result in complete and total victory. Some wars end with a peace offering. And some wars end in hope. But all these wars are nothing compared to the most the most frightening war of all. The one you have yet to fight. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.07 – RISE UP If you are a normal person, one of the few things you can count on in life is death. But, if you are a surgeon, even that comfort is taken away from you. Surgeons cheat death. We prolong it, we deny it. We stand and defiantly give death the finger. We put things to rest, only to have them rise up again. So if death is not the end, what can you count on anymore? Because you sure can't count on anything in life. Life is the most fragile, unstable, unpredictable thing there is. In fact, there is only one thing about life we can be sure of. It ain't over till it's over. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.08 – These Ties That Bind It's intense what happens in the OR when lives are on the line and you are poking at brains like it is silly putty. You form a bond with the surgeons right next to you. An unbreakable, undesirable bond. It is intimate being tied together like that whether you like them or not you become family. The ties that bind us are sometimes impossible to explain. They connect us even after it seems like the ties should be broken. Some bonds defy,distance, time and logic. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.09 – In the Midnight Hour When you're little night time is scarey because there are monsters hiding right under the bed. When you get older the monsters are different. Self doubt! Loneliness! Regret! And though you may be older and wiser you still find yourself scared of the dark. Sleep! It's the easiest thing to do. You just close your eyes. But for so many of us sleep seems out of our grasp. We want it but we don't know how to get it. But once we face our demons, face our fears and turn to each other for help night time isn't so scarey, because we realize we aren't all alone in the dark. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.11 – Wish You Were Here We all get at least one good wish a year. Over the candles on our birthday. Some of us throw in more. On eyelashes. Fountains. Lucky stars and every now and then one of those wishes comes true. So what then? Is it as good as we’d hoped? Do we bask in the warm glow of our happiness or do we just notice we’ve got a long list of other wishes just waiting to be wished. We don’t wish for the easy stuff, we wish for big things. Things that are ambitious, out of reach. We wish cause we need help, and we’re scared .... and we know we may be asking for too much. We still wish though, because........ sometimes......... they come true. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.12 – Sympathy for the Devil My mother used to say this about residency. It takes a year to learn how to cut, it takes a lifetime to learn not to. Of all of the tools on the surgical tray sound judgement it the trickiest one to master. And without it we’re all just toddlers running around with ten blades. We’re human. We make mistakes. We mis-estimate, we call it wrong. But when a surgeon makes a bad judgement call it’s not as simple. People get hurt, they bleed. So we struggle over every stitch, we agonize ... over every suture. Because the snap judgements, the ones that come to us quickly and easily without hesitation, they’re the ones that haunt us forever. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.13 – Stairway to Heaven Denny [voice over] Beginning Voice Over: I believe in heaven. I also believe in hell. I've never seen either but I believe they exist. They have to exist. Because without a heaven, without a hell, we're all just headed for limbo. Denny: [voice over] Heaven. Hell. Limbo. No one really knows where we are going. But the one thing we can say for sure, with absolute certainty, is that there are moments that take us to another place. Moments of heaven on earth. And maybe for now that's all we need to know. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.14 Beat Your Heart Out Any first year med student knows that an increased heart rate is a sign of trouble. A racing heart could indicate anything, from a panic disorder to something much .... much more serious. A heart that flutters or one that skips a beat could be sign of a secret affliction .......... or it could indicate romance, which is the biggest trouble of all. It seems like we have no control over our own hearts. Conditions can change without warning ... romance can make the heart pound just like panic can. And panic can make it stop cold in your chest. It’s no wonder that doctors spend so much time trying to keep the heart stable, to keep it slow, steady, regular ..... to stop the heart from pounding out of your chest from the dread of something terrible or the anticipation of something else entirely. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.15 – Before and After Every patient’s story starts the same way, it starts with them being fine, it starts in the ‘before’. They cling to this moment this memory of being fine, this ‘before’, as though talking about it may somehow bring it back. But what they don’t realize is that the fact that they’re talking about it to us, their doctors ..... means..... there’s no going back. By the time they see us they’re already in the ‘after’. And while every patient story starts the same way how the story ends depends on us, how well we diagnose and treat. We know the story hinges on us, and we all want to be the hero. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.16 – An Honest Mistake There’s this thing that happens when people find out you’re a doctor. They stop seeing you as a person and begin to see you as something bigger than you are. They have to us that way, as gods, otherwise we’re just like everyone else. Unsure, flawed, normal. So we act strong, remain stoic, hide the fact that we’re all too human. Patients see us as gods or they see us as monsters but the fact is, we’re just people. We screw up. We lose our way. Even the best of us have our off days. Still we move forward ... we don’t rest on our laurels or celebrate the lives we’ve saved in the past. Because there’s always some other patient that needs our help. So we force ourselves to keep trying, to keep learning ..... in the hope that, maybe, someday we’ll come just a little bit closer to the gods our patients need us to be. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.17 – I Will Follow You Into The Dark Every surgeon I know has a shadow. A dark cloud of fear and doubt that follows even the best of us into the O.R.. We pretend the shadow isn’t there, hoping that if we save more lives, master harder techniques, run faster and farther it’ll get tired and give up the chase. But like they say ..... you can’t outrun your shadow. Every surgeon has a shadow.....and the only way to get rid of a shadow is to turn off the lights, to stop running from the darkness and face what you fear. Head on. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.18 – Stand By Me Opening VO: Surgeons aren't known for being warm and cuddly. They're arrogant, impatient, mean as often as not. You'd think they wouldn't have friends, because who could stand them! But surgeons are like a bad cold - nasty but persistent. Surgeons. Nasty, aggressive, unstoppable. Just the kind of people you want on your side when you're really screwed. Closing VO: Practicing medicine doesn't lend itself well to the making of friends. Maybe because life and mortality are in our faces all the time. Maybe because in staring down death every day we're forced to know that life, every minute, is borrowed time. And each person we let ourselves care about is just one more loss somewhere down the line. For this reason, I know some doctors who just don't bother making friends at all. But the rest of us, we make it our job to move that line. To push each loss as far away as we can. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- 5.19 – Elevator Love Letter Alex: [voice over] Surgeons are all messed up, we’re butchers. Messed up, knife happy butchers. We cut people up, we move on. Patients die on our watch, we move on. We cause trauma, we suffer trauma. We don’t have time to worry about all the blood and death and crap really makes us feel. Alex: [voice over] It doesn’t matter how tough we are, trauma always leave a scar. It follows us home, it changes our lives. Trauma messes everybody up but maybe that’s the point. All the pain and the fear and the crap, maybe going through all that is what keeps us moving forward. It’s what pushes us. Maybe we have to get a little messed up before we can step up. ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- ----------------------------------------------------------------------- Edited by oncetherewasaway, Apr 7 2009, 11:46 PM.


Seasons 1 thru 7 - VoiceOvers · Episodic Chat