Television Illnesses and Diseases

On season 7 episode 3 of Grey’s Anatomy, there is a patient that comes in with the condition HPV or “Tree Man” disease. Human papillomavirus infection, or HPV is a common sexually transmitted infection, this infection causes warts in various parts of the body. There are over 100 strains of HPV but those that get epidermodysplasia verruciformiswart have a genetic mutation that limits the immune system’s ability to handle HPV, if this happens, the virus can spread and take over creating tree-like growths.

In the beginning of the episode the patient’s wife is fighting with him to come out of the car but he refuses. The doctors and nurses come and tell her that they are parked in an area only for patients and she tells them that her husband is a patient if only he came out of the car. The doctor then asks him to come out and he says he doesn’t want to because they won’t be able to help him. He is wearing a hoodie and his face cannot be seen this whole time until the doctor asks him again to come out and he shows his face full of warts and asks her if she can actually help him out. Everyone that’s there then has a surprised face, but he comes out and then when they see his tree like hands one of the nurse’s yells surprised and disgusted. He then acts annoyed and says aren’t people nice and that’s why he stays in his house.

During the episode they don’t really explain how it comes about but they explain what happens to the body and how there is no cure, but they can treat him. Overall the way that he looks like in the show is exactly like in real life so that part is correct. Now I’m not a doctor or nurse so I can’t really say how they react when they see rare or difficult things to look at but I’d like to think they don’t make their patients feel bad. I think though the way they show how the doctor reacts versus the one working towards their residency is used to show the difference between how doctors are supposed to act and how everyone else does. Throughout the whole episode the doctors are very professional and don’t act disgusted even when operating on him. The ones working on residency though are disgusted to be working on him, they all are making faces and don’t want to be there at all. The doctor tells them they need to be used to whatever the human body throws at them if they want to be doctors, and in that moment a spider crawls out of the hand she is operating from and she gets up and freaks out until they kill it for her. I think they do this in the show to show that although the doctor isn’t disgusted about working on the patient, she is scared of more simpler things like a spider.

The way they portrayed the patient and his wife was very interesting and believable. He didn’t want to get out of his house because of this disease and hadn’t been out for four years. His wife stayed home with him as well and she is the one that pushed him to get the surgery because she said it was difficult to be with him, she wanted to go out with him and do normal stuff but they couldn’t because of his appearance. She tells him that if he doesn’t get the surgery she will leave him.

At the end of the episode they tell the wife that they’re going to have to keep operating on him and that they haven’t been able to find normal skin on him so he was going to have a lot of open wounds and that they were going to probably wait a couple months or years until he was better. She then said she didn’t know if she was going to be able to wait that long because he was never gonna look normal, as her husband stated before, he was gonna look like “Frankenstein”. I think this part has some truth in it but also might just also be to make the problems and issues the other doctor was going through throughout the show known. It of course is a difficult disease to have because of the way people see you, and I think they did a good portrayal of how people would react to it with only using people in the hospital setting.