old post from TV.com - warning, I'm a lab tech and my favorite department is Blood Bank, so any mistake they make in that area REALLY irritates me. :-)
12-31-06 -
On Friday's show, they had a woman come in, conveniently confide to Liz (who is pregnant with Jason's baby and letting everyone believe it's Lucky's baby) that the baby she was in labor with was not her husband's baby, it was his best friend's baby.
ffwd to the delivery, when there is a problem with the baby AS SOON as it comes out of the mom, and all of a sudden they are saying the baby needs a transfusion, and Liz magically knows that the baby is NOT the same blood type as the mom, so it MUST be the same blood type as the dad, and since the guy there is NOT the dad, SHE has to be the one to break patient confidentiality (so she shouldn't have a job Monday) and tell him this fact and have the police go get his best friend (how exactly did they know who he was besides his first name??) and drag him to the hospital so he could provide blood for a transfusion.
SO MANY PROBLEMS.
#1 - any blood bank is going to just give a baby in that situation O negative blood.
#2 - they hadn't had time to even send the Blood Bank the cord, much less get the results back.
#3 - do you have ANY IDEA how long it takes to process donor blood?? There is no way they would take blood from the father, even if the baby turned out to magically be the same type.
#4 - how would they know the father's type? Blood banks routinely test the mother's type before delivery, but never the father.
#5 - blood types don't work like that. Just because the baby isn't the same exact type as the mother doesn't mean it's going to be the exact same type as the father. You get two genes - the dominant gene is expressed and you get the phenotype, the A or B. If there's not one, you get O. If Mom's genotype is AO and Dad's is BO, baby could very well be OO and not match either of them. And that's not even counting the Rh factor. If the baby needed that transfusion NOW, they would give them what they had - O neg packed cells, and AB plasma, since those are the universal donors for each category.
GH did this when Sam was in DIC back in May, too. Emily went around recruiting people who were O positive to give plasma when Sam was AB - O plasma has antibodies to both the A and B antigens which would be on Sam's red cells. That plasma would have killed her. AB plasma is universal because it has no antibodies to anything - you can safely give it to any of the four blood types without causing a reaction. (the Rh factor doesn't matter in plasma)
Call me silly. I just think that a show which revolves around a hospital to the point of having the word in the show title should pay a little more attention to getting actual medical "stuff" right.
