TV Drama 'Saved My Life'

Who says TV medical dramas are empty entertainment? Not Angela Cooper.

One Thursday evening in February 2002, the then-28-year-old Edgewood, Tex., woman settled in to watch "ER." In the episode's climactic scene, a return of brain cancer was diagnosed in Anthony Edwards's character, Dr. Mark Greene. The telltale sign: When Greene was asked to stick out his tongue, it deviated to one side.

"That's what made me know that I had something terribly wrong," Cooper said. Until then, she'd blamed her migraines, increased forgetfulness and occasional tongue-biting on the stress of a recent divorce and her efforts to raise two kids on her own while going back to school.

Cooper looked in the mirror, stuck out her tongue and then did what about a third of viewers do with what they learn about health and medical issues from such shows: She took action. She high-tailed it down to her local ER and "went in and told them I had a brain tumor. . . . They laughed and thought I was crazy," Cooper recalls. "Then I showed them my tongue and their jaws dropped and they started listening."

From there, a diagnosis was rapid: nasopharyngeal carcinoma, or head and neck cancer. It took two rounds of treatment with chemotherapy and radiation for Cooper's cancer to go into remission. She has been cancer-free for three years.

One year after the "ER" episode ran, Cooper wrote co-executive producer and emergency medicine physician Joe Sachs to thank him for writing that story line.

That episode, she told him, "absolutely saved my life."

Just being responsible, was the reply. "You also save lives," said Sachs, "just by being accurate."

-- Christopher J. Gearon