A Lesson from Grey’s Anatomy
I’m hooked on Grey’s Anatomy. A friend told me about the show a few weeks ago when he caught a particularly exciting episode. I tuned in the next week to see what the big deal was.
Now I’m a faithful, if delayed, viewer. This past week’s episode was another good one. But before I get to the lesson, let me fill you non-viewers in on the premise of the show.
Set in a Seattle hospital, five surgical interns are struggling to keep up with their training while not forgetting they are also people. Of course these interns are supervised by a team of established doctors who have their own life crises to deal with. Ahhh… a soap opera in the evening. 
One of the plots in this week’s episode involved a high school hockey player who severly mangled his finger. The doctors fixed his finger, wrapped his hand in a huge cast and told him it would be a couple of weeks before he could play hockey again. But this young man was adamant that he play in a hockey game that afternoon. You see college scouts would be there and it was his only chance for an athletic scholarship (apparently his grades weren’t that good).
The doctor told him that they couldn’t take off the cast without risking permanent damage and sent the boy on his way.
Later that day, the boy returns carrying a cooler with his hand wrapped in a bloody rag. He had cut off his finger so that he could put on his hockey glove. “I learned how to do it on the Internet,” he proudly told the doctors.
What the Internet didn’t tell him, however, was that putting the chopped off finger into a bacteria infested cooler wasn’t a good idea. Nor did it tell him that putting his hand into a sweaty, icky glove wasn’t conducive to healing either. The infections made reattachment impossible. The end result, this young man was going to lose most, if not all, use of his hand.
He just couldn’t understand how this could happen… after all, he’d gotten the instructions off the Internet.
It sounds crazy and far fetched but more and more often I’m hearing stories of people doing stupid things they learned about on the Internet.
So here’s the lesson from Grey’s Anatomy.
Just because you can doesn’t mean you should! Think twice before you do something your grandmother might not approve of.
