One of my favorite TV shows is the British comedy series Doc Martin, about the irascible former surgeon whose sudden phobia of blood results in his becoming a general practitioner in a seaside village. It's always fun to try to guess the disease of the week before the Doc does, and I'd say I figured it out about a third to half of the time. But in season 6, the lady who collected shells and made jewelry with them had me stumped. She had fatigue and achy elbows. She was a redhead, and Doc said she was too tan and should stay out of the sun so much. Then she passed out on the beach. Then she told him she'd taken iron supplements because she'd been feeling so weak, and Doc told her she was an idiot because her bloodwork showed she had hemochromatosis and an astronomical ferritin level of 2,000. I was aghast. I hadn't even recognized my own disease from its depiction onscreen.
When I think back on the episodes of TV shows I've seen use hemochromatosis as a plot element, the dramatic treatment—and sometimes the medical treatment depicted—seemed at times completely wacky or wrong. The first time I saw a show that mentioned hemochromatosis was a rerun of the original CSI, season 1, from about fifteen years ago. (This show probably first aired a year before I was diagnosed, but I didn't see it then and wouldn't have known what hemochromatosis was.) In that episode, the effect of hemochromatosis on electrical conductivity in a person proved murder. Okay, maybe that one wasn't off base; I'm always experiencing severe static electric shocks in stores when no one else around me is having a problem.
Awareness of the disease and its supposedly strange symptoms apparently picked up momentum among TV writers in the 2000s. The series House, MD (2004-2012), had no less than three episodes with hemochromatosis as the disease of the week. All of those cases occurred in very young people. In one horrific episode, the patient, a supposedly mixed-race teenage girl from the African-American community in New Orleans, is said to have “become darker” over time and thus show a “traditional” sign of hemochromatosis: bronze tinge to the skin. She also had (gross-out alert!) a bowel movement from her mouth! After watching that episode, I was afraid that people would assume this was a standard event for people with the disease, so I stopped telling people I had it. In another House episode, a problem child with arthritic fingers is diagnosed by the doc and stabbed in the arm by said doc, who then proclaims as the blood drips, “He'll be fine in the morning,” as if one phlebotomy could neutralize hemochromatosis overnight.
In an episode of NCIS: New Orleans, a patient had medical equipment at home because he did his own phlebotomies!
I'm sure I don't watch enough TV to have seen anywhere near all the “hemochromatosis” episodes that have been aired. If you know of some more, append a descriptive comment here and I'll try to create a hemochromatosis filmography as a resource for future viewing.
When I think back on the episodes of TV shows I've seen use hemochromatosis as a plot element, the dramatic treatment—and sometimes the medical treatment depicted—seemed at times completely wacky or wrong. The first time I saw a show that mentioned hemochromatosis was a rerun of the original CSI, season 1, from about fifteen years ago. (This show probably first aired a year before I was diagnosed, but I didn't see it then and wouldn't have known what hemochromatosis was.) In that episode, the effect of hemochromatosis on electrical conductivity in a person proved murder. Okay, maybe that one wasn't off base; I'm always experiencing severe static electric shocks in stores when no one else around me is having a problem.
Awareness of the disease and its supposedly strange symptoms apparently picked up momentum among TV writers in the 2000s. The series House, MD (2004-2012), had no less than three episodes with hemochromatosis as the disease of the week. All of those cases occurred in very young people. In one horrific episode, the patient, a supposedly mixed-race teenage girl from the African-American community in New Orleans, is said to have “become darker” over time and thus show a “traditional” sign of hemochromatosis: bronze tinge to the skin. She also had (gross-out alert!) a bowel movement from her mouth! After watching that episode, I was afraid that people would assume this was a standard event for people with the disease, so I stopped telling people I had it. In another House episode, a problem child with arthritic fingers is diagnosed by the doc and stabbed in the arm by said doc, who then proclaims as the blood drips, “He'll be fine in the morning,” as if one phlebotomy could neutralize hemochromatosis overnight.
In an episode of NCIS: New Orleans, a patient had medical equipment at home because he did his own phlebotomies!
I'm sure I don't watch enough TV to have seen anywhere near all the “hemochromatosis” episodes that have been aired. If you know of some more, append a descriptive comment here and I'll try to create a hemochromatosis filmography as a resource for future viewing.