![]() ROBB BETTIKER: And my mother told me to be quiet. ![]() ![]() And somebody yelled out, "He's in V-fib! Shock him!" And I was running around the room, "He's not in V-fib! He's in V-tag! Don't shock him!" BROOKE GLADSTONE: DR. They were coding the patient, doing chest compressions, rolling in the machines and they had the person's EKG up on the screen, the monitor, where you could see it. I was in medical school and was home visiting. Have you ever watched, say, an episode of "ER" and gotten just royally teed off? DR. BROOKE GLADSTONE: You are a doctor, and there are an awful lot of doctor dramas on television. ROBB BETTIKER: If a bullet is so close to the surface that you can pluck it out, you could just leave it alone and it'll fall out on its own in a few days. BROOKE GLADSTONE: You don't need a medical degree to guess that. ROBB BETTIKER: It sounds rather painful, you know. BROOKE GLADSTONE: On the ABC series "Lost," somebody pulled a bullet out of his own arm. You're not going to hobble like they do in the action/adventure movies. Shattered bone, probably not going to kill you, but that limb is useless. Spinal cord injury could be instantaneous paralysis or paralysis that develops over hours. Ruptured liver or spleen, minutes, hours or days, depending on how much you want the person to bleed. Special attention to bleeding into a body cavity. "Doc, How Much Time Do I Got?" And I have bullet to the heart, brain - pretty much instant death. What are, say, the top few points for getting the gore right? DR. And they start saying, "Well, what if I stab instead of slash?" BROOKE GLADSTONE: So tick off what you say in your lecture. ROBB BETTIKER: What I find the students are most interested in is when I have a picture of the neck. BROOKE GLADSTONE: So what question do you get asked the most? DR. This year, they all were writing murder mystery stories and they all wanted to know, you know, how deep the knife had to go. ROBB BETTIKER: And last year, a lot of them wanted to have people commit suicide, so I altered my talk and I went more heavily into the poisonings. ![]() I say, "Could you just give your first name and tell me who you want to kill and why?" BROOKE GLADSTONE: DR. ROBB BETTIKER: What I do at the beginning of the class is I go around the room. In the classroom, he gets straight to the point. To make sure it is, he delivers a lecture he calls "Gunshots, Arsenic and Bleeding Out Your Eyes: A Physician's View on Writing about Murder, Poisons and Bioterrorism." Dr. He enjoys a clever murder, as long as it's based in biological truth. Robb Bettiker is an infectious disease specialist by training and an advisor to would-be mystery writers by avocation. Both strive for convincing portrayals of blood and guts, but to know if you're doing it right, you need a blood and guts expert - in other words, a doctor. BROOKE GLADSTONE: Now we move seamlessly from war movies to murder mysteries. ![]()
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