"Doc" Is Winning Me Over

 

“Doc” invites comparisons to another Fox medical drama in House, MD, but it’s not the last-second diagnosing or the “The Resident” style office politics nor the impossibly high-stakes second-season opener that aired last week that threatens to melt my medically-ambivalent heart. (I both admire great doctors for their skills and clear path in life,but also have experiences that makes me resent them, more than slightly.) Not so great for appointments, but kind of makes me an eager audience for most medical drama, besides the fact that it sadly remains a dependable source of disability depictions—can’t call them representation-mostly, on the mainstream airwaves.  So, if blogging were like my health, I need them as much as I think they’re wrong a lot.

Maybe if I were younger when this show came out, Dr. Amy Larsen’s quest for a do-over wouldn’t pull on my heartstrings so hard, even as I know that I didn’t get a *start* to need a new start from in many ways. It’s refreshing to hear the ADA spoken of in positive terms, even if it’s only once and applied to someone who is something of a legend in her profession.(Too often, on television, and other places the thought of protecting disabled people’s rights is a pop-culture punchline—it’s been hard to imagine other civil rights laws spoken about the same way, but not so much lately, part of the reason I’m jealous of Amy Larsen for not remembering 2016. Almost wish I could say the same, but I’ve missed too much in any case.)

I won’t say the medicine doesn’t matter on “Doc”—there are all the last-second saves and ethical dilemmas we might expect—interesting scenario with the resident treating her rapist, but it may have been more effective if the show had let us know her first.  I suppose it does show how Larsen’s bulldozing ahead in the wake of her son’s sudden death kept her from being a compassionate supervisor, though.(It takes a lot before we, as an audience, can forgive a woman for not being nice. Must be even harder if you don’t look like the always radiant Molly Parker.)

My younger self probably would not believe that I’m almost…rooting against Dr. Larsen going back and taking up her full place on the hospital hierarchy…she was very concerned with trying to be the best at all times, even in places where that didn’t apply.  She would think it a knock on Womankind if we don’t agree that this highly-trained professional should just get back in her slot and start plugging away again(Nor do I think she should adopt the ex-husband’s baby and reconcile with him after the blonde has an accident at the Plot Point factory.) But I don’t believe that work saves anyone in quite the same way anymore and I’m not sure we should tell people it does. 

This Came Up In Memories...

 If you want to see me and hear my voice, you can watch me read one of my "Collegiate" type stories, it's here.The Happiest Place On Earth

"Crip...er, Fish Out Of Water"....

 

For an episode of television that is a.  animated, and b. Not designed in any way to showcase the disability experience(as indeed, very few episodes of television are, which is why I’m always looking for it in places where I probably shouldn’t find it.) “Bojack Horseman” seemed to highlight certain frustrations we all share, but that might hit harder for my disabled self.

The usually-selfish and coasting former sitcom star BoJack Horseman is riding high after the sports bio-pic “Secretariat” gets nominated in a film-festival in a sort of undersea Scandinavia. He struggles because of the equipment that allows a horse to breathe underwater—more on that at the end—and  can’t sleep because of the time change.

Which makes him late for his event, fall asleep on a bus, and end up helping a male seahorse have babies(They get separated and one of the babies gets attached to BoJack, who is surprised, but for once, doesn’t attempt to leave the little beast with someone else…maybe the affection it gives him means more when he’s so vulnerable?   It’s hard to tell with heightened emotions and minimal dialogue—as well as the, like, frustration muscle memory from trying to take a bus to college in a wheelchair for two years—sidenote, glad that paid off—literally making me sweat and fear for this cartoon horse the whole time.

Things should get more comfortable at the festival lovefest, right, but, as Paul Buchman would say, not so much.   BoJack spots a director that he had a role in getting fired, but he thinks he can’t talk to her with his scuba equipment on. He pours his heart out in a note, only to find, after several drafts, that his musings are smeared and illegible.  Adding insult to injury, the last  day’s revelation that the scuba suits have a button at the neck so people can speak.

Saying Good Stuff About My Friend's Book..

 

The book is called Suffer For This” and, as a long-time online friend,  albeit one where we’ve never even broken bread because of the country in between us and because your Bohemian Crip can’t globe-hop like she might want, I had to check this out. The first thing I’d say is that, especially given that the title is “Suffer For This”, I’m glad I didn’t have to. At times, it can be hard to know what to say about a friend’s work, especially when he has edited you before.(I do feel like I know Victor on a more intimate level now, since it was our hobbies that brought us together initially, and at a point when you might be past the whole collegiate What Does It All Mean?  bull-session thing. )

We never really got to love and marriage, much less the “things that you do in the dark that make the daytime seem all right” or whatever the Tennessee Williams quote really is—I’m close, all right? The fact that might be good enough for me probably says something about my declining standards, but there was a point where I’d never make this post because my “Life is my Adena Watson case,” energy would mean hours of tracking down the quote and forgetting about what I wanted it for.  Given that, I think a certain amount of imprecision counts as a personal best. Which means, I think you can tell that I liked reading about some of the encounters that made it somewhere between prose, poetry, and memoir in this book without relating very much at all. “Purely physical” is more about eating when I’m not hungry, if you’re me. Not anything that makes you sweat.  I think, if I had to describe my own love life and couldn’t use phrases like “that one time,” or even more sadly, “in my in-box”, I might have to go back to a poster that hung in the independent-living center when  I was at my crip-power fiercest—hey, it was the 1990s-we thought we still had hope—Anyway, there was a poster of a deaf woman ordering a pizza on a TTY, and the caption read “It took an act of Congress to order this pizza,” and that’s what my history is like. At least,it could make a sentence now; at times, I’ve had my doubts.  But, yeah, not a lot of room for falling into things, so I might  have read something like this and judged it a lot instead of appreciating it—the one thing disabled people always get to be is Too Good For This World—the “so, could you leave?” is often implied.  So, maybe it’s good I didn’t know that stuff before. I’d have read it wrong, anyway.

Even though, as you might have guessed, I’m sort of behind for my age, so I might always be down to yak about  What It All Means in person, if somewhat short of things to contribute.) I really liked this book. I found it tough, tender, and revealing.