Science Article
March 15, 2001
Fugitive from reality
Hutch technician consults on Hollywood marrow harvest, finds plot calls for mix of true-to-life procedures, fantasy
Dr. Richard Kimble (Timothy Daly)
prepares to have his marrow extracted by a Dr. Thayer (Veronica
Hamel) during a segment of CBS-TV's "The Fugitive," filmed
last week at Snoqualmie Valley Hospital in North Bend.
Photo by Cindy Slaugh |
I've seen thousands of bone-marrow harvests in my 10-1/2 years at the Hutch, but none of them was even close to what I witnessed one day last week.
Instead of a room of medical professionals, this harvest was attended by hundreds of onlookers trained in the ways of entertainment, not the real world of a marrow transplant.
I was in North Bend on the set for an episode of the CBS-TV show "The Fugitive," whose crew was filming the show's hero, Dr. Richard Kimble, donating marrow for his sister, a leukemia patient.
For those unfamiliar with the 1963-67 TV drama or the 1993 movie of the same name, the current TV version of "The Fugitive," which debuted last year, portrays the plight of Kimble, who is falsely accused in the murder of his wife, and the only way to prove his innocence is to find the killer, a one-armed man. Thus, Kimble is always on the run.
Since the episode filmed last week called for Kimble to be a marrow donor, it was a nice coincidence for the Mukilteo-based CBS crew to be headquartered near Seattle, the hub of research into bone-marrow transplantation, which was pioneered by our own Dr. E. Donnall Thomas, who won the Nobel Prize in 1990.
Credibility adviser
It made sense that the TV crew wanted help from the Hutch to make the marrow harvest look credible. Since I'm the surgical technician in the Hutch's Cellular Therapy Lab and have assisted in countless harvests, I was asked by Susan Edmonds, Hutch media-relations manager, if I wanted to serve as a paid technical adviser.
Sure, I told her. It seemed a good opportunity to give people an accurate look at the process, or at least to correct errors before they got on the screen. So on Monday, March 5, I took a vacation day and drove to Snoqualmie Valley Hospital, which had been made over into a fictitious "Beltway Hospital" in Washington D.C.
The filming of the segment was to last only two hours. Twelve hours later, we were done. They filmed everything over and over again, so they could paste the pieces together in the final version.
My role as a one-woman truth squad had started before the filming. That's where the fudging of reality also began.
To prepare for the filming, the crew had rented a DNA replicator for a prop, thinking that it was important to show that Kimble's DNA matched that of his sister. I tried to tell them that our longstanding procedure would call for her to be an HLA (human leukocyte antigen) match, but they told me that viewers would understand "DNA" much better, so they were sticking with that.
I also was asked to bring some fake bone marrow. So Lisa Bush, a technician from our lab, helped me augment a base of Hollywood fake blood with a mixture of V8 juice, catsup and pork fat. It looked beautiful. We were very proud when we were done.
On the day of the shooting, despite my best efforts, the fantasy continued.
Marrow is harvested from a donor's hip, and the donor, dressed only in a patient's gown, lies face-down on an operating table during the procedure. But the script called for the actor playing Kimble - Timothy Daly, known for his role on TV's "Wings" - to have his street clothes on, down to his socks and shoes, so that when the moment came for him to flee, he could do so fully clothed.
So the sterile atmosphere that usually exists in a marrow harvest obviously didn't turn out to be too sterile!
Another problem related to the anesthesia. Donors usually get general or epidural anesthesia, as local anesthesia isn't enough to control the pain. But this posed a problem. With general anesthesia, the donor would be asleep, and with an epidural, the donor would be temporarily paralyzed from the waist down - in both cases unable to miraculously leap off the table and run.
So what to do? At first, thinking of 19th-century medicine, I jokingly said, "Why don't you give him a bullet to bite on?" Then I turned serious, asking them, when they depicted an injection going into Kimble's spine, to take out any reference to the type of anesthesia used.
They agreed. It was a minor victory, but the procedure still looked a lot easier for the donor than it really is.
The attending physician for the harvest was named Dr. Thayer and played by guest star Veronica Hamel, best known for acting in TV's "Hill Street Blues." She was shown taking only one pull of marrow, instead of the 200 that are typically required. She was supposedly the only medical professional in the operating room - no nurse anesthetist, no surgical technician, no assisting doctor. Ah, TV.
The segment probably won't last more than a few minutes in the finished product. In the script, as soon as Kimble's marrow is extracted, Thayer gets a phone call prompting her to tell him that the police are on his trail. So Daly indeed was filmed leaping off the table, and the adventure continued - to another location shoot, on another day.
Mixed experience
For someone like me, who hadn't seen "The Fugitive" before I was asked to help, it was a mixed experience. I think the segment will educate people somewhat. At least I know it'll be more true-to-life than a similar segment that I saw on "ER." And the Hutch and the National Marrow Donor Program may appear in the credits. The concept of donating marrow is a great one to promote.
But the experience also bordered on the surreal. Inside the operating room were at least 50 writers, producers, directors and other technical staff, while hundreds of others, including a huge catering crew, hovered outside. The lights and bodies generated so much heat at one point that the hospital's fire alarms went off.
Others in our lab besides Lisa - Jennifer Neu, David Yadlock and Bryce Baril - got behind-the-scenes peeks at the action. Everyone was asking me why they didn't depict a stem-cell harvest, since nowadays there are many more of those than marrow harvests.
Stem-cell harvests, though, take place in a relatively placid apheresis room, much the same as in a blood drive. The TV crew wanted the drama of an operating room. That's Hollywood!
