The Story #20: The Movie

My saga of attempts to get medical care continues with an adventure in film making.

One blog reader suggested that I pursue getting medical care by contacting medical schools, which, she said, revel in using patients as guinea pigs for its students. I have to admit, the thought had crossed my mind on more than one occasion.

In fact, I started drafting a film based on the notion of re-enacting an “It’s Academic”-style competition that pitted medical students from competing schools against each other. I toyed with the idea of incorporating as team coaches famous TV doctors, like Hugh Laurie as Dr.
House, playing their TV roles in a real life “film” scenario.

Of course, no film would be complete without a romantic interlude. And so the film would start with a flashback scene from 25 years prior with a young med student’s happenstance one night stand with a much younger me. (You didn’t think that I wouldn’t use the film as another chance to try to get medical care, did you?)

The two had met in a Northern Virginia bar featuring a country western band, managed by the med student’s uncle. I was drowning my tears at the bar over lost love, when in walked the tall, thin image of Clint Eastwood as portrayed in “Fistful of Dollars.”

He stared at me the whole night before finally mustering the courage to ask me for the last dance. It was a slow dance, and he was a fine dancer. Holding correct dance position or stance, he pressed me closer. He ended the dance with a long, slow back bending and dizzying embrace. He offered to drive me home as I’d become quite inebriated.

The student was a sophomore in a Michigan college to which he would be returning the next day. That detail had eluded me the night before. I became distraught upon hearing the news because I liked the young man considerably.

The one thing I knew we both had in common was that we had both been riddled with more than our share of illnesses as kids. Illnesses, I learned, that we still had then and that I know I still have today having never been properly diagnosed nor treated by any doctors.

Fast forward to today. Hugh Laurie, as House, is busy filming episodes for next season when he comes across an announcement that Johns Hopkins University Medical School is seeking a coach for the academic team that will be pitted against Georgetown University Medical School’s team in a battle of wits to determine which of the schools has the better diagnosticians. On a dare and as an alumnus, House cannot resist the challenge. So he leaves the crew mid-shoot to become JHU’s team coach.

The storyline leaves ample opportunity for the “House” cast to interject sideline sarcastic remarks about House’s untimely departure in an effort to get him to return to filming.

As JHU’s team coach, Dr. House meets with Georgetown’s team coach (another famous as-yet-to-be-determined TV doctor) who happens to have been the young med student in the film opening scene. The two antagonists inevitably become friends.

In the interim, a half dozen patients with complicated illnesses have been chosen to be publicly diagnosed during the televised competition. I am among the patients.

As things progress, we learn that my illness, actinomycosis, is communicable if sexually transmitted. (This bacterial infection is slowly progressive and often only becomes apparent in mid-life once it has already wreaked much havoc on the body and incited secondary conditions to arise making correct diagnosis a challenge.)

Interspersed among competition questions are flashback scenes from the guinea-pig patients’ doctor visits that reveal the reason for the question and the various influences that can lead to poor patient outcomes.

The Georgetown coach eventually realizes that his long-ago romantic interlude subconsciously affected his treatment of the patient with actinomycosis and that his having contracted the disease explains his own elusive health maladies. He’s given a second opportunity to be a hero, saving my life and his own with Dr. House’s help.

An alternate film scenario replaces the teams of med students with a team of actual doctors pitted against a team of TV doctors known as the “laypeople” team.

~ by doctorblue on May 25, 2009.