THE BOARD  (click a room)

I'm Loretta Marriott. I've been a registered nurse since 1985 and an emergency nurse for eleven of those years, and for the last four I've been the night charge nurse in the emergency department of a big hospital in Indianapolis. I work three twelve-hour nights a week, seven to seven. That means I'm at work on a lot of Thursday nights, which means ER is the one show on television I have to tape, every single week, since the first season.

On my nights off my friend Camille Holman, who works nights with me, comes over with a bag of microwave popcorn and we watch the week's tape and grade it. My husband Rod watches with us for about ten minutes, says it's too much like what I tell him about at breakfast, and goes to bed. Camille and I have been doing this for five years now. People at work ask us on Monday what grade it got.

I want to be clear about one thing. I love this show. I am going to complain about it below, because complaining is what nurses do on break, but it's the best show about my job that has ever been on TV, and it isn't close. And so nobody asks: there are no stories about my own patients on this page, not even with the details blurred. Those belong to them.

The pace. An emergency department doesn't run at one speed. It's slow, slow, slow, and then four ambulances in twenty minutes and a waiting room full of people who all arrived at once for no reason anybody can explain. The show gets that rhythm. The camera never sits still and neither do we. (And if you ever work in an ER, never say the word "quiet" out loud on a slow night. I'm not superstitious. I just don't say it.)

The board. That big dry-erase board by the desk with the room numbers, the names, the complaints and the initials of who's got who? That's real. Ours looks just like it, except our markers are always dead. The whole department runs off that board. I was thrilled the first time I saw it on the show, because it told me somebody who'd actually worked in an ER was helping them.

The nurses who really run the place. Watch the background. Haleh, Lydia, Malik, Chuny, Conni, Lily: they almost never get a storyline, but they're the ones who know where everything is, which doctor to call and which one not to, and how to get a patient up to a bed when the floors say there aren't any. That's every good ER nurse I've ever worked with. When Haleh gives a resident that look, I have given that look.

The words. They talk fast and they talk right. The doses, the tests, the shorthand. My sister-in-law says she can't follow half of it, and that's fine. It means they didn't dumb it down.

Who comes through the doors. County is a public hospital and they show what that means: people with no insurance and no doctor, who come to the ER because it's the one place that has to see them. The regulars who know the staff by name. The drunk on a Friday, the grandma who's been sick for a week and didn't want to bother anybody. That's a real Saturday night, minus some of the shouting.

How tired everybody is. The residents look terrible. Good. They should.

Doctors doing nurses' jobs. This is the big one, and Camille and I yell at the TV about it every week. On the show, the doctors start the IVs, draw the blood, hang the medicines, push the stretcher up to radiology and sit with the scared patient holding their hand. In a real ER the nurses do nearly all of that, and the doctor is across the department writing orders and seeing the next patient. The doctors I work with are good at what they do. Most of them couldn't find the IV start kits without asking.

Doctors doing everybody else's jobs. Pediatricians crawling into storm drains. Surgeons doing detective work. We have paramedics, firefighters, social workers, chaplains, security and an entire lab, and they're all better at their jobs than a doctor would be at them.

Patients who recover by the next commercial. On TV, somebody comes in looking awful, gets a shot of something, and is sitting up talking by the next scene. Real people get better slowly, if they get better. Most of what happens to a patient happens after they leave us, upstairs, over days.

CPR. A few years ago some doctors wrote up a study in a medical journal where they counted the CPR on ER, Chicago Hope and Rescue 911, and the people on TV came back far more often than real people do. Most real cardiac arrests don't end with the patient opening their eyes. I wish they did. While I'm at it, and this is every TV show, not just this one: you don't shock a flat line. The paddles are for a heart that's beating wrong, not one that's stopped.

The charting. Nobody on ER ever does any. I spend a third of my shift writing things down. If it isn't written down, it didn't happen.

The hair. It's four in the morning. Nobody's hair looks like that. Mine certainly doesn't.

Carol Hathaway is the nurse manager at County, and she's the reason I keep watching. Here is why she's my hero:

• She knows her patients. Not the diagnosis, the person. She's the one who remembers the kid's name and the mother's name and what the father does for a living.

• She stands up to the doctors when they're wrong, and she does it to their faces. Every nurse has had to do that, and it's one of the hardest parts of the job. She makes it look like the right thing to do, because it is.

• She stands up for her nurses, too, to the administration, about staffing and money and safety. That's what a good manager does and it's rare.

• She came back. She was supposed to be gone after the very first episode, I've read, and audiences liked her so much they kept her. She had a terrible first day on that show and she rebuilt her life, and they let her be human about it. I respect that.

Julianna Margulies won the Emmy for playing her in 1995, and she deserved it. Season five ended with the whole staff finding out Carol is pregnant with twins, and with their father in another city. I'll be watching to see what they do with her, and I will have opinions.

George Clooney left the show in February, in the two-part episode called The Storm, partway through his fifth season. Camille cried. I did not cry. I sniffed once.

Here's the nurse's view of Doug Ross. He's charming, he's a good pediatrician, and he's great with kids. He is also every doctor who ever decided the rules didn't apply to him and left the nurses to deal with what happened next. On TV that's romantic. At three in the morning, in real life, it's paperwork and a phone call to the nursing supervisor. I liked watching him. I would not have liked working with him. I'd have liked working with Mark Greene, who apologizes.

Clooney's off making movies now and good for him. The show's been fine without him so far. It's always been an ensemble, and the ensemble is the point.

Season six starts this Thursday, September 30, and I'll be at work. The tape is in, the timer's set, and Rod has been told in writing not to touch anything. Camille and I are off Saturday and she's bringing the popcorn. We will be grading. TV Guide says there are new faces coming in. I hope at least one of them is a nurse.

Meanwhile, here are my eight favorite episodes, graded for realism, from the pilot in 1994 through last February.

Another nurse's page on here: an ER nurse in Atlanta has put up The Country Doctor, remembering DeForest Kelley, Dr. McCoy on Star Trek, who died in June. Nurses and our TV doctors. We can't help it.