Soaped up Tube

It's not often that I can be profoundly affected by a soap, but Hollyoaks somehow got to me tonight, and i'll shrug the embarrassment of admitting that I still watch this show to make my point.

Of course on another day the same thing might have had little to no affect on my brain. It depends in part what emotional state a person finds themselves in at the moment they see or hear something. I don't think I'm particularly fragile right now though.

A person being in hospital, not fine, but seemingly conscious and communicating one minute, then intubated and unlikely to ever wake up again the next is what hit me hard, and it did so in two ways.

First, it got me to thinking that a lot of the time this is probably more the way this situation plays out in real life, and it's quite rarely handled as such on TV. Normally the character is either comatose and on life support from the outset or they die without even being on a respirator. Just seeing somebody awake one minute and being kept alive by machines moments later, even an actor, for some reason got to me... I think, because in any meaningful way, that's more or less the point at which the person is lost. Not always of course, but often.

This led on to the more practical thinking. Like most lucky people I've never needed to be intubated. It's another thing I've seen on TV hundreds of times without even flinching, but in this soap, which incidentally is often poorly written, and very much so in the case of this particular storyline where the tubed individual's nurse was his girlfriend a week ago and now she barely looks upset - this soap, because it drew attention to the tube, gave it a jarring effect. The thought of it being inserted is bad enough, but waking up and being entirely unable to communicate amplifies the horrific nature of it a great deal, perhaps unfairly given that it's clearly a life saving piece of equipment.

Hollyoaks is entertaining for it's set pieces. It's like sketch drama. This was a strong dramatic sketch. Now please, absorb my real message and try to forget I was talking about Hollyoaks.