Nurse Lori Cannon looks at her patient, a 21-year-old man whose neck was broken in several places in a car crash, then explains calmly and clearly some of the injuries he has, reminding him he’s no longer in a parking lot, but in an airplane headed to Honolulu.
Nurse Lori Cannon looks at her patient, a 21-year-old man whose neck was broken in several places in a car crash, then explains calmly and clearly some of the injuries he has, reminding him he’s no longer in a parking lot, but in an airplane headed to Honolulu.
Cannon, who works with Hawaii Life Flight, maintains that steady tone as she asks the man if he wants her to call his mother in Pennsylvania. He does, and after delivering the man to an ambulance that will take him to The Queen’s Medical Center, she makes the call.
It’s one of many such emergencies Cannon has worked, and one of the first two stories told by production company Zero Point Zero in The Weather Channel’s new series “Hawaii Air Rescue.” The show premieres Sept. 12.
“It was a good opportunity to show people what we do,” the Kona-based nurse said.
Fellow nurse Anne Broderson agreed. Broderson and paramedic Johnny Goetsch, both of whom also work out of West Hawaii, took an East Hawaii man to Honolulu in the first episode after the man nearly had a leg severed in a lawn mower accident.
“This is just what we do for a living,” Broderson said, noting she was surprised the production company would be interested in filming the flights.
To her, she said, the work can seem mundane but it’s her job. To others, it can seem like an interesting occupation, she added.
“It’s a good way to showcase the limitations of health care here,” she said, adding the show highlights the lack of certain medical specialities and medical facilities.
Goetsch said the show also illustrates to Americans on the mainland just how isolated the Hawaiian Islands are.
“It’s completely by itself,” Goetsch said. “We don’t have a lot of the resources.”
The show opens with a narrator noting the islands’ remoteness, and the limitations of the neighbor islands’ medical care options.
“When disaster strikes, there’s only one place to go for critical care,” the narrator said, as the shot zoomed in on a map of Oahu, “and there’s only one way to get there.”
That isolation, and the inherent drama in helping people in the midst of a medical crisis, appealed to series producer Chuck Smith.
“A lot of cases were cardiac cases,” Smith said. “The clock is ticking. That provided a lot of drama for our show.”
The paramedics’ and nurses’ personalities make the show more compelling, he said.
“The nurses and paramedics are a big draw,” he said. “They’re people people. They’re very considerate. They care.”
He had worked on a number of medical productions in the past, and he was following up working on several Alaska-based programs when someone had the idea of doing a medical show in Hawaii. His camera crew members were mostly Alaska-based, and they jumped at the chance to spend June and July in Hawaii to film the series.
By the end of filming, the crews were living the same schedule as the life flight employees — being on call 24 hours a day, staying within 20 minutes of the airport, days with no emergency flights followed by days with several back-to-back cases.
Goetsch said being filmed was more work than he realized.
“You have to learn how to relax and speak into the camera,” he said. “I’d have to really change my dialect when it comes to clinical terms.”
He said he couldn’t just talk about a patient in an interview using “huge Latin terms,” and he had to remember to rephrase the question the camera person asked in his answer, to give viewers the most information possible.
Already Smith is gearing up for a possible second season if The Weather Channel executives see high enough ratings. The first season is six episodes, and the first two will air back-to-back, Smith said.
Although the series focuses on critical health situations, Smith said it’s not all “gloom and doom.”
He said the show doesn’t let much time pass before people are reminded that it’s set in Hawaii, with shots of surfing, waves and other scenic locales interspersed with the stories.
All three employees praised the production staff for how professional they were in dealing with patients and respecting the patients’ and flight crews’ privacy and requests.
“They were great at staying out of the way,” Goetsch said. “At any time, I could say, turn the camera off.”
Cannon agreed. The camera crews seemed to learn lots about how the flight crews worked, and the Kona staff became friends with the main camera operator based in West Hawaii.
“It was a real ohana bonding relationship in working with them,” Cannon said.