I had such high hopes for Grey’s Anatomy.  I remember watching the pilot episode and thinking that it was a really great reflection of what I’d imagined went on in a busy city hospital.  And then it went and turned into a big, mushy soap opera with everyone sleeping with everyone else and people falling in and out of love with each other every week.  It was kind of the same path that ER took, and it’s why I stopped watching that many seasons ago. 

I wanted the show to succeed.  I wanted it to show me what the hospital was like, with the heroic measures and the ordinary daily craziness of the pressures of holding people’s lives in your hands minute by minute.  Most of all, I wanted it to show me what it was like for my dad when he would go into work for these insane 12-hour shifts, where I never really got any information out of him about his day other than the fact that it was busy.  All I heard about were some minor things here and there and some basic stats, like the crazy day when there was a chemical leak near the hospital and Dad came home and told me he literally had about a minute each to decide how to save his patients — or if they could be saved at all.  Later on, now that he’s retired and we’re both adults, the stories come slowly leaking out, like the young Russian kid who spent a Thanksgiving with us because he came into the hospital and had nowhere else to go, or the meth addict who threw him into a wall, or the six-month AIDS scare from a patient who was fighting him and bled all over him that I never knew about, or the kid who coded in the parking lot.... 

I knew he was a good doctor.  I just never really had a real idea of the kind of things he dealt with seriously on a daily basis, and the pilot episode of Grey’s gave me a small glimmer of an idea, and the more I saw of that serious world of medicine, the more proud I was of him.  And now I almost feel like I’ve lost some of it because the show has gone so far off that track.

And yet, I was still up this morning at 7:30am watching it on TiVo.  And I was up at 7:30am on a Sunday morning watching TV after having barely gotten 5 hours of sleep because my idiot inconsiderate neighbor upstairs once again was blasting her TV and it woke me up through my ceiling.