I was thinking about how my position on medical realism in storytelling has changed.
When I started this blog, all the common mistakes/tropes/myths really got inder my skin, because life/medicine/the human body usually doesn't work the way it does in movies or TV.
Or rather, movies and TV like to ignore how things really work in service of telling a better story.
And when people think life works like the movies, it adds real difficulties by way of unrealistic expectations. It makes the real world harder.
Then my pendulum swung toward, "tell a good story with enough detail that it feels real enough for the world you're building." Basically, I loosened up a bit, and recognized that stories are meant to be fantasies.
Then I watched the first few episodes of E.R. for the first time the other day courtesy of Mrs. Scripty, and realized that when a good writer gets the medicine right, you can have both incredible storytelling and pinpoint accuracy. (I spotted one tiny error in the first 4 episodes of ER, which, all else being equal, is an incredible accuracy rate. Even the characters' mistakes are completely appropriate based on specialty and experience).
I think you're still better off deciding how real you want your story to be, and what you want the impact of a given injury/illness to have on your character, and what you want it to reveal about them, and back-building from there.
But damn is it good to watch a show really fucking nail it.