The Pony League baseball game was just one of hundreds played in the Chicago area on a recent summer day. That was just the point for 13-year-old Tom Ford and his physician, Stewart Goldman.
“The game was a true highlight for me,” said Goldman, director of the Falk Brain Tumor Center at Children’s Memorial Hospital in Chicago. Ford is a patient who through chemotherapy has significantly reduced a large tumor in his head. The tumor is benign but its size was putting pressure on the teen’s skull and threatening his life. He has been in and out of the hospital since he was 6 years old.
Getting back on the baseball field was a primary objective.
“These kids [with brain tumors] just want to be normal kids,” Goldman said.
Ford, Goldman and many other patients, parents, doctors and nurses will be featured for the next six Tuesday nights in “Children’s Hospital,” a new PBS reality series (9 p.m., WTTW-Ch. 11) co-produced by the British firm Lion Television and Oregon Public Broadcasting. It is an intense six hours of television with equal doses of purpose and story lines.
The weekly hour inside the worlds of people like Ford and Gail Brodkey, an emergency room social worker who separates fact and sometimes parental fiction about how a child was injured, is plenty enough to process. You will find yourself thinking about these kids and their parents for days.
It might be a 10-month-old baby who needs a new liver (like his toddler brother, who needed a similar transplant just months earlier). Or maybe a 10-year-old boy whose mother accidentally ran over his leg with a riding mower, then, in horror, of course, heard her son ask, “What are we going to do?”
The folks at Lion wrapped up filming in April, but clearly would have attended Ford’s baseball game and likely filmed it on a Sony DSR-500 CK camera, which is small enough to allow the show’s producers to shoot their own film while another production person records sound. A crew of seven people shot hundreds of hours of film.
“The new cameras do two things,” said Nick Catliff, executive producer of the series and company director of a firm that has produced many programs for PBS, BBC, Discovery and many other networks. “We can be at the hospital longer because it costs less to keep the crew there. And our filming can be more intimate.”
Hospital search
Lion Television developed a short list of prospective children’s hospitals for the series. A pre-production visit to Children’s Memorial, in which a producer spent about three days accompanying doctors during their workdays, won over Catliff and company.
“It is a self-confident institution,” he explained. “We wanted to cover issues but not in an environment where doctors and nurses are defensive. Plus, we realized there were some fantastic characters among the doctors.”
Another fact that didn’t hurt was Children’s Memorial’s status as one of only five free-standing pediatric research centers in the country and numerous designations on top 10 lists of specialties. Chicago was another attraction, Catliff said, calling it a “great American city.” Scenes of the skyline and elevated trains are used as a way to indicate day, night or next day. Lion producers arrived in mid-2001, but didn’t start filming for nearly two months, using the early weeks to gain the trust of doctors, nurses, parents and kids alike.
A question begs: Why would parents allow their kids to be documented with Sony cameras during such vulnerable and tumultuous times? Some families did decline participation, Goldman said, but many others were willing to become the stars of this series.
“I was actually surprised at how open the kids and parents were,” Goldman said. “Some kids simply appreciated the chance to tell their story. In a way, it makes them feel special.
“For parents, one motivator was raising awareness about children’s illness. They wanted to help other families get through it a little bit easier.”
Private moments
The access to private moments will stagger viewers at times. One scene lasting a couple of minutes shows the reaction of a mother and grandfather absorbing the fact they just took an infant son off life support.
“We have a long track record of doing documentaries about children’s hospitals here in the U.K.,” Catliff said. “In fact, during one production, one of my business partners had his own daughter fall ill and stay in a hospital for a long time. It made him and all of us think about what we are doing.”
Catliff said cameras in a hospital are undoubtedly invasive. He said it was incumbent to put the emotional access to highest use.
“We wanted to examine and discuss major issues facing children’s hospitals,” he said. “On another less overt level, we are hoping people think about themselves in the process. What makes it all work is good storytelling.”
Variety of topics
The series is divided into six topics, including decision-making, emergency room diagnosis and treatment, pioneering research, societal issues such as child abuse and whether HIV-positive kids are proper candidates for organ transplants, costs and how chronic illness changes the course of childhood. Some doctors and patients appear in several episodes, while others, like a 3-year-old girl who has put a pearl up her nostril, make one-time appearances.
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Goldman is a featured doctor. His comfort in front of the camera allows viewers to see how two of his days never unfold alike, but that he always makes a direct connection with his patients. One minute he is complimenting a young boy on a new pair of yellow shoes, then turning to his mother to discuss the boy’s equilibrium problems.
“I am expecting the series will catch the reality of what we do,” said Goldman, who will see the series for the first time on Tuesday nights like most everyone else. “These kids all continue to amaze me on a daily basis. They live life to the fullest.
“It is actually uplifting. You would be surprised at how good I feel after a day’s work. I am constantly reminded what’s important, how I appreciate the health of my three children and wife I love dearly.”
Costly bills
The series does catch the human spirit in flight, even when a 6-year-old girl’s body is racked with spinal and muscular atrophy or a mother talks about losing financial security and going on Medicaid to pay for her daughter’s ongoing fight to live. One of the stiffest realities of this series is who pays the bills.
“We have $29 million of uncompensated care [each year],” said Patrick Magoon, chief executive officer at Children’s Memorial Hospital during a recent interview. He explained Medicaid doesn’t pay the full cost, while in the series a doctor wonders how state legislators who propose cutting Medicaid funds figure to care for sick kids who would be using those dollars.
Magoon said the series will increase the hospital’s visibility, helping to raise money (“philanthropy is an important resource to enhance what we do, but it can’t be used to sustain us”) or recruit top doctors and nurses (“we are the only children’s hospital with magnet status for pediatric nursing training”).
He framed it less as a competitive advantage in the Chicago market and more as a way to realize the fortune of having children’s hospitals in communities.
“It is a great opportunity to share with the public what goes on in a children’s hospital,” Magoon said. “There are only 59 free-standing children’s hospitals in the country, providing 1 percent of care for kids. But we provide unique services, teaching and research.”
For example, he said, free-standing children’s hospitals train 30 percent of the country’s pediatricians and half of all pediatric specialists. What’s more, 44 percent of all children on Medicaid are served by such hospitals. One potential value of the series is educating legislators about the real-life kids and parents who are squeezed by Medicaid and other health care cuts.
“We take care of patients based on need,” said Al Johnson, who makes frequent series appearances as a lead physician in the emergency room. “Patients with full insurance inevitably subsidize the non-insured.”
That comes from the same guy who helps locate an obscure instrument to remove the pearl from the 3-year-old’s nose or doesn’t flinch when a 9-year-old boy is rushed in with a bullet wound from being caught in gang crossfire.
Real-life approach
The show’s producers boost the real-life feel by showing an aptitude for spare narration and a comfort level with occasional silences because facial expressions can communicate more than enough. The pace of the show is decidedly slower compared with the typical prime-time medical drama. But truth doesn’t need any fast track here.
Maybe one incident best portrays the change-your-thinking power of the hospital’s countless heroes, especially the kids themselves. After months of working on the show, particularly after tagging along with the Children’s Memorial transport team to deliver donated organs and spending off-camera time with doctors such as Stewart Goldman, one Lion Television producer, 25-year-old John Fitton, decided to become a pediatrician. He starts medical school in London this fall.
“He was a great talent as a producer,” said Catliff during an overseas phone call. “But we lost him to a noble cause. He will be a great doctor. I just talked with him yesterday. I am trying to get him to work during his vacations. Medical students are always broke and need money.”