|
THE CREW ARRIVED ON A THURSDAY,
RIGHT AFTER LUNCH. FRESH FROM THE BIG APPLE, THEY ALL CRAMMED INTO
MY OFFICE AND PROJECT NYT-TV WAS UNDER WAY.
For the next month, the four-person television
crew would stake out the maternity areas of Stanford and Lucile
Packard Children's Hospital and shoot anything and everything to
do with babies -- the younger, the better. In fact, as I later learned,
babies before birth were best of all. Capturing the elusive beginning
of a story on film was a prize the crew was chasing from day one.
They came to film two one-hour episodes of a new
television series tentatively titled "Maternity Ward." Modeled after
their successful series "Trauma: Life in the ER," New York Times
Television and The Learning Channel planned to send crews to various
U.S. hospitals to tell the stories of the doctors and nurses who
help bring babies of all stripes into the world. Our visitors' eventual
sojourn at Stanford University Medical Center really began back
in June when we in News and Public Affairs first learned that our
hospital had caught the interest of producers at NYT-TV. "Show us
your numbers," they challenged.
I faxed them as many of our statistics as I could
collect, unsure of where their interest lay: 4,400 births per year;
1,300 babies admitted to the neonatal intensive care unit (NICU)
each year; and 600 assisted reproductive technology procedures per
year for the 550 patients annually who visit the Stanford Reproductive
Endocrinology and Infertility clinic. They were impressed and sent
a producer for a whirlwind hospital tour and a meet-and-greet of
the key players.
Then it was decision time. Would Stanford be willing
to allow a camera crew to film on site, 24 hours a day for a month?
It was an enormous request. Physicians are understandably wary of
having their every move recorded on tape, and as professor
of gynecology and obstetrics Maurice Druzin, MD, and assistant professor
of gynecology and obstetrics Yasser El Sayed, MD, later pointed
out, obstetrics is the most litigious field in medicine. A normal,
straightforward delivery can turn disastrous in a matter of minutes
and the possibility of a taped scene being misinterpreted was a
real concern. It all came down to a matter of trust. Stanford would
have no editorial control over how it would be portrayed when the
program finally appeared on television. We had to simply trust the
producers, who promised us that their intentions were not to cast
the hospital in an inaccurate or tainted light, or to vilify the
medical staff who work here.
"Every hospital we've worked with has really loved
the product," the field producer, Michael Selditch, reiterated to
me later. "The real reason we're here is to show how the people
who work in this hospital are bringing lives into the world and
preventing all the potential disasters there could be. Especially
here at Stanford where there are a lot of high-risk situations."
After hospital administrators and department chiefs
gave the nod, and NYT-TV revealed (after a nail-biting couple of
weeks) that our hospital had been selected among three finalists,
at last the crew was set to arrive on Aug. 5.
As the Stanford coordinator of the entire project,
I spent most of the final days before the journalists' arrival dealing
with logistics -- getting scrubs, pagers and name badges for the
crew and dealing with a flurry of consent forms covering permission
for the hospital to release medical information, permission for
New York Times Television to film inside the hospital and permission
for individual patients and staff members to appear on television.
Colleagues rallied to produce and hang posters in English
and in Spanish throughout the hospital to alert staff and patients
of the impending visit. Two days after setting
foot in the hospital, the crew switched on their cameras and went
to work. Almost immediately there were problems. The irresistible
force of the television media crashed into the immovable object
represented by the nurses in labor and delivery. Rightly so, the
nurses' ultimate concern and allegiance lay with their patients
and, as later became clear, no one had fully explained to them what
these TV folk were doing, invading this sacred domain with their
blustery manner and their in-your-face cameras.
FEELING THAT TV CAMERAS HAD NO PLACE
IN A LABOR AND DELIVERY WARD, SOME DOCTORS AND NURSES OBJECTED TO
VIDEO-JOURNALISTS APPROACHING PATIENTS AS SOON AS THEY ENTERED THE
WARD. Out
of concern for their charges, they also declared many of the high-risk
patients off-limits. The crew members, in turn, were increasingly
frustrated by their inability to ask patients up-front if they would
like to participate in the project and were upset at being denied
access to the high-risk patients. After all, these were patients
with compelling stories to tell and Stanford's reputation as a treatment
center for high-risk mothers and babies was one of the primary reasons
for selecting the hospital.
Ten days into it and less than halfway through the
planned one-month shoot, feathers were ruffled on both sides, and
I was concerned that the entire project was slipping down the drain.
Alarm bells were also ringing back East, prompting the rapid dispatch
of a senior producer to launch a salvage operation. Michael pointed
out that sending a producer to visit the crew on location was standard
procedure, but I sensed that there was more concern than usual about
the progress of this shoot.
Tuesday night, Aug. 17, I was invited to dinner to
meet the Big Wig producer from New York. Fearful that he would be
an overbearing TV-type bombarding me with demands and questions,
I was apprehensive about the appointment. But over salmon and a
glass of wine my concerns were laid to rest. Charles Poe turned
out to be eminently reasonable and a veteran of diplomacy. For the
next several days, Charles, flanked by Michael and me, gave a brief
presentation at the change of each nursing shift to explain more
about the crew's needs and goals, and to address concerns and questions
within the unit. When emphasizing the importance of open communication
with the staff, Charles later reminded the crew, "You're the elephant
with the camera and you might as well say,
'We're the elephants and this is what we do.' "
The company and its producers had planned that, like
"Trauma," the program would hinge on a handful of central characters
-- doctors and nurses who agree to have the cameras shadow them
as they go about their daily routines. Once the crew had selected
a dozen or so possible characters and focused the majority of their
attentions on them, relations between the hospital and the video-journalists
improved considerably. Rather than flitting from one doctor to another
and zipping in and out of patients' rooms and lives, the members
of the crew now had focus. They would be spending much of their
time with staff who had agreed to be filmed and were comfortable
having the camera as a constant companion.
Feelings of much-needed teamwork then began to evolve
between the video-journalists and the characters. The new spirit
of cooperation slowly infused the unit as other staff members saw
how the story of their profession would be told. "Some who were
adamantly against it in the beginning wound up recruiting people
for us," Michael said, reflecting on the change in attitude among
the nurses. They began to believe that Charles' words were more
than empty rhetoric: The goal was not to search for the greatest
pain and anguish, but rather to give a television audience a glimpse
into the real world of the people who work with babies -- the dramatic
and the mundane. By following a core cast of characters the viewers
get to know the caregivers and their patients.
Charles also explained to the staff the importance
of every story having a beginning, a middle and an end. A life hanging
in the balance in the NICU would not find a place in the show unless
it was seen in context. The viewers want to find out how the infant
got there, and they want to know the outcome. The story of a healthy
baby bonding with its mother is incomplete without scenes from the
baby's birth, as is footage of a birth without later shots showing
how mother and baby fared. In this way, the staff came to understand
why it was so important to the crew to begin filming at the earliest
possible moment. In rare situations when the action was unfolding
too quickly for a patient to be consulted beforehand, the camera
would keep rolling. If the patient later decided that she did not
want to be included, permission was not granted and the company
would not use any footage of that patient. But with the video-journalist
filming right from the start, options were always open.
FILMING IN LABOR AND DELIVERY PRESENTED
ITS SHARE OF DIFFICULTIES BUT FINDING AND FOLLOWING STORIES IN THE
INFERTILITY CLINIC AND THE NICU PROVIDED ANOTHER SET OF PROBLEMS.
Of the 16 births that the crew was able to film,
thankfully for the new parents, only one baby, a boy, had to be
admitted to the NICU. He was born on the fourth day of filming and,
except for a few days at home, remained in the hospital for the
crew's entire stay. He endeared himself to Michael, in particular,
who bought him a small knitted teddy bear in the final days of the
shoot. Before tucking the toy into the baby's crib, Michael said
of the boy's mother: "She's going through a very difficult time
and was open enough to share that."
The maternity units provided both joyful and wrenching
moments for the crew, but the infertility clinic was the most distressing
for Michael. "That's been the most difficult thing -- watching people
go through in vitro fertilization and not get pregnant. It's
so sad to see these couples trying, and not get pregnant," he said.
The worst moment came when he was at a patient's house, waiting
with her for the telephone call that would deliver the news of a
positive or negative result of her pregnancy test. When the bad
news came, Michael was ready with his camera but felt "horribly
awkward." "I felt like a big jerk," he said. "Here I was with this
woman in her house and I felt like a big voyeur and that I shouldn't
be there. It was really, really sad."
Finally, after spending 28 days at Stanford, the
crew began shipping out in dribs and drabs over the Labor Day weekend.
The shoot had been a challenging one for the crew. At Charity Hospital
in New Orleans, the only other hospital to be included in the "Maternity
Ward" pilot series, approximately eight of every 10 mothers asked
had agreed to participate in the documentary. At Stanford, far fewer
-- approximately one in 10 women -- consented to being filmed. Nevertheless,
Michael left with a box of tapes comprising 180 hours of video --
more than 40 hours for each week that the crew spent in the hospital.
Back in New York, he would have the next eight months
in the editing room to figure out how to pare the material down
and splice it together to come up with two one-hour television programs.
The plan was for one show to focus on high-tech medicine, incorporating
the neonatal surgeries they had filmed and the other to highlight
IVF. Both shows would also include footage of healthy, happy babies
who required no extreme medical intervention.
As for me, come Tuesday, Sept. 7, I was back at the
Medical Center, but the familiar video-journalist sentry stationed
at the front desk of labor and delivery was gone, and the utility
room that had been the crew's "office" was strangely empty -- wheelchairs,
IV stands and spare bedside tables filling the space where the team
members had once huddled over their cameras and notebooks. The posters
were removed, pagers relinquished, and, somewhat wistfully for me,
life returned to normal. SM
Related
articles:
Good Show
How It All Adds Up
Goats? In the OR?!
|
M
E D I C I N E