Technology is Our Friend

Somewhere in the midst of re-reading the first four chapter of the new Sarah Tolerance book I devided that a Mrs Carr ought to be Mrs White. So I did a search and replace throughout the document, with, um, unintended results. Worked a treat, of course, for changing the names. But suddenly, in reading the chpater over, I saw words like Whiteiage and Whiteying and Whiteied. I love search-and-replace. Except when I don't.

All the right moves

I've been thinking more, um, theoretically in the last few days about how I want to write this book I'm working on. And yesterday, by accident, I wound up seeing "Love's Labors Lost," the episode from the first season of ER that won a gazillion Emmies. A woman and her husband show up at the ER; she's eight months pregnant or thereabouts, feeling dizzy. Dr. Green checks her out, sees nothing major going on, thinks it's a UTI, discharges her, and in the parking lot she has a seizure. Back into the ER they go. Dr. Green discovers that she has eclampsia. Things go from there to bad to worse and ultimately to disaster: no one from obstetrics can come down to help, nor can she go upstairs; the woman's OB is in the middle of a delivery across town, and then stuck in traffic. Dr. Green keeps saying "drag someone from OB down now, but no one ever comes. They have to induce; the baby goes into distress; they try to deliver but the baby gets stuck with a shoulder delivery; he winds up doing an emergency C-section. The baby survives, the mom is bleeding like crazy, the OB shows up, tears Dr. Green a new one, then patches the mom up. But she dies anyway.

It is one of the more harrowing hours of TV I've ever seen. The mom and her husband (played by Bradley Whitford, later Josh on The West Wing) are adorable--they clearly love each other, they're funny, they can't wait for that baby, they trust the doctors. You just know that the doctors are going to fix everything, because that's what they're there for, and anyway, it's their show. When the mom dies you feel a real sense of loss. And what makes it more harrowing is that for the first 30 minutes or more it seems like Dr. Green is doing all the right things--or most of them. Every time OB says no one can come down, he deals. Every time something goes wrong, he makes what seems like the best decision in that situation. About 40 minutes in, you realize that he's begun to do things because he feels responsible and he's going to fix the problems he's caused.

So now I'm thinking about this idea of all the right decisions leading to all the wrong outcomes. It's likely to be very hard on one's characters.