Pilot

night time. view of perfectly ordinary concrete / grass / trees and ground, shot top-down from a height. As the protagonist speaks, camera slowly pulls back upwards, then levels to horizontal so its looking at horizon, then pulls back so that he is occupying the left side of the image, half / three quarter view of head and shoulders, he is standing over a balcony.

“I’ve never really been afraid of heights. Sometimes as I look down, I can almost feel it : the wind on my skin, in my hair, as arms outstretched I fall into eternity, into silent solace... “

pause
he leans forwards over the balcony

“Fly away…”

A nurse in uniform wanders in the right of the frame and stops. She is clearly talking but we hear no words. She is young, and very well endowed.

nurse: (talking, holding an IMR / drug chart, muted) goes on talking during lead’s solliloquy

“Four freaking. AM. And this is the shit I have to put up with. Be a banker, my mom said. Be a lawyer, or an architect, my dad said. Did I listen? Noooooo…”

pause
camera wanders from the nurse back to the protagonist, taking in the 6 bedder cubicle along the way

“My name is x… I’m a medical officer. Welcome to my life.”

Nurse: still talking (voice on, suddenly) So doctor ah, you order sleeping pill for Mrs Tan can?

X : It’s bloody four thirty in the morning. Don’t tell me she hasn’t been able to sleep all night!

Nurse : No, because she every night pain, so I charted her pain score, and then after I wake her up just now she can’t go back to sleep.

Freeze on nurse.

“This is Y. Not the sharpest knife on the block,”

Handwritten scrawls and arrows and stats appear all over her body

“But I guess she’s all right. She’s a nurse.”

Unfreeze

Nurse : (holds out the IMR) So ink up now, ok?

Code Blue Alarm rings

Nurse and X look at each other in alarm.

“That’s the code blue alarm. A life hangs in the balance.”

Nurse : Lo kun…. Code Blue!

X : I know lah.

The pair run out the cubicle, back into and down the ward, into a cubicle with a blinking blue light on the ceiling, with the cameraman chasing behind on foot.


Scene :

Houseman is trying to set a plug, looks up (scared) and stammers “He just collapsed. No pulse, how?”

Freeze

“This is Y. He’s doing completely the right thing to do in this situation…. if you want to kill your patient. Ordinarily I would say he was thick. But since he’s on his third day on the job I’ll be nice.”

X : (coldly) Shouldn’t you be pumping on his heart instead of fiddling with his arm?!? Duh!

Houseman starts doing CPR. X sets the plug. Nurse draws the curtain.

“Because we’re seasoned professionals who do this every day for a living, this resuscitation is going to end up like most of the other resuscitations we do.”

Registrar runs in the cubicle. More SPo2 machine sounds (beep, beep) and calls for adrenaline, atropine, ECG stat, b/p stat etc.

Spo2 sound changes to flatline (beeeeeeeeeeep)
All four come out the cubicle resigned, dulan looks all around, throw their gloves into bin.

Camera follows them back to the counter in silence, the 3 doctors sit down and look depressed. The nurse takes out the drug chart and says “you never ink up the sleeping pills, and also don’t forget to ink up the adrenaline you gave just now”

“Welcome to my life.”

Roll start music, and title screen

********************

Scene :

Operating theater.

X is retracting and looking bored.
Consultant doing an op.

“This is me doing what I do best. Making a lady open wide with my hard metal rod so my boss can poke around inside her. Have I mentioned how proud my mother is of me?”

Another consultant pops in and peers over the first consultants shoulders

Consultant 2 to consultant 1 : Wah, private patient. High standard. What atas surgery are you doing?

Consultant 1 : Whipples lor. SSDD. Eh did you hear about the fuck up last night?

Consultant 2 : Eh, don’t cut that one lah. No, that one! No, no, that… ok nevermind. I guess she didn’t really need it anyway. No, what happened?

Consultant 1 : Patient crashed lah. New houseman, new MO…

Consultant 2 : Which ones? Which? Did the patient make it?

Consultant 1 : Of course not lah. Tell you more… later. (casts a meaningful look at protagonist)

Freeze frame