It takes a few years to figure out exactly how to do a splenectomy, but the doctors on “Saving Hope” have had a crash course, starting with how to pronounce the medical terms and holding a scalpel, to tying off arteries and taking out those spleens.

And this crash course has been led by Dr. Luke Szobota, Chief Surgical Resident at Toronto’s Sunnybrook Hospital. He’s the real-non-coma Charlie who is working as a consultant on the show to make sure all of the medical scenes are as real as possible.

“My work here involves going over scripts and giving ideas and discussing some of the medical expertise that’s involved in producing a show like this,” Szobota says. He takes all of his medical knowledge and translates it for the team of writers.

“I think part of knowledge translation – taking something very complicated like medicine and putting it in layman’s terms – is something we do day to day in the hospital, trying to explain complicated procedures to patients in a very straight forward manner so they can understand what’s happening,” Szobota says.  

“I do the same thing here for the writers and producers so they can then put it on paper and have the actors play it out.”

One of the funniest mistakes Szobota has caught was that the script said the doctors were going to remove an adrenal tumour from the liver. “That means they’re taking a tumour from a different organ, taking it out of the wrong organ,” he says with a laugh. “They also described the prep we use to clean an area as a ‘betadine chlorhexidine prep’, but really it’s either a betadine solution, or chlorhexidine, not both! That would make it double clean,” he laughs.

One of the most complicated surgeries Szobota has consulted on was a “trauma laparotomy for a penetrating wound injuring the inferior vena cava.”

“Put into normal English, it’s that someone was stabbed and a very big blood vessel at the back of their abdomen was injured causing them to bleed into their stomach, internally, making them almost die,” explains Szobota.

Szobota hopes the writers will throw in an “open abdominal aortic repair from a ruptured aneurysm.”

 “It can have a dramatic presentation and it’s an exciting surgery to perform,” Szobota says with a smile. “The other surgery could be a pancreatic duodenal resection, a Whipple procedure, which is also a very big, complicated surgery. It can be technically fun to perform!”