Netflix ER Drama Pulse Shines by Including Authentic Disability Representation

As a team of injured soccer players is taken to the emergency room on stretchers, Harper Simms Rueda next to one of the teenagers to evaluate it. «Call neurosurgery. Let me advance to prepare an airway,» he calls while pushing his wheelchair towards trauma bay.

Jessy Yates plays Harper Simms, a second year emergency medicine resident, in LegumesNetflix’s new medical drama that follows the life of doctors and staff in the most occupied level I trauma center in Miami. The series has a lot of drama, romance and medical procedures, but what makes it highlight of similar shows is the inclusion of a doctor who uses wheelchair, played by yachts.

«As disabled people, we are so accustomed to seeing stories that do not reflect our experience, but the showrunners got it in a way that I have never experienced,» says Yates, who, like his character, is a wheelchair user.

While developing Harper’s role, Legumes The creative team consulted with doctors who use wheelchairs. Yates had to shade one of them, Dr. Daniel Grossman, an emergency medicine doctor from the Mayo Clinic who has a spinal cord injury. Yates witnessed the adaptations made by Dr. Grossman, like how intubates patients. «When you are intubing a patient, they are a bit too high in bed to reach them, so Dr. Grossman throws them on his lap and puts a blanket behind the head, and that is what my character ends up doing,» says Yates. «It became vulnerable and intimate because you have someone who cannot breathe in your lap, and you are helping to administer their breaths. He feels less clinical.»

While seeing Dr. Grossman interact with patients, Yates realized that being a wheelchair user was, in a way, his superpower. «Much of emergency medicine is detective work. You must find out what could have taken them there,» says Yates. «When you are standing on a patient, you can feel more like an authoritarian type of interaction, but when you are sitting, it becomes a conversation. His patients opened as fast as a supplier because they felt comfortable.»

Legumes Capture how agitated and accelerated works in an emergency room. It can be difficult for doctors and staff to meet their own physical needs, such as having to urinate. In an episode, a timer shoots on Harper’s phone reminding him of using the bathroom. Configuring a timer is something suggested by another program consultants, Dr. Allison Kessler, a disabled doctor in Shirley Ryan Sasklab. When Harper finally has a time to get to the bathroom, someone is using the only accessible position, so he has to wait. Then, after Harper is transferred to the bathroom, he realizes that he has no catheters about it, a time when many catheter users can probably relate.

Legumes It also addresses the capable that Harper faces as a disabled doctor. When Harper enters a child’s exam room with a broken arm, the parents look at her uncomfortably. The parents’ question does everything do to help their child and ask for a «real doctor.»

Yates is grateful that Pulse Showrunners do not shy away to address issues like this. She was suspicious at the beginning of what could be a «TV version» of history, and wanted to be honest with the spectators. She is happy with the product and her creators. «They were never interested in hitting a character in a chair and then assuming that it would be a normal experience, because it would not be.»

The 10 episodes of Legumes are Available to see in Netflix.