Meredith Gray in Colombia

Meredith Gray (Ellen Pompeo) with Dr. Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) on Walt Disney Television's "Grey's Anatomy." Craig Sjodin / Getty Images

The first case is a high-flow priapism attack.

A pair of lovers arrive at the emergency room of a hospital in the coastal region of Colombia.

The young woman explains at the triage post that the man has been experiencing an uninterrupted erection for thirteen hours.

The man denies having taken sildanefil but admits to having ingested a liter of a homemade aphrodisiac drink - a popular pharmacopoeia "mattress breaker" - and that the disorder is already very painful.

They give him a powerful blood thinner and keep him under observation.

The doctor on duty warns the girl that in very reluctant cases the internal pudendal artery must be embolized.

The girl, overwhelmed by technical terms that she does not understand, fervently crosses herself and the image freezes.

Thus began the first episode of "San Judas Piloto", my version for Latin America of "Grey's anatomy" (2005-2017), the series with a hospital theme distributed by Walt Disney Studios.

The commission to adapt a gringo series for a Spanish-American open signal audience was a decisive intellectual experience for me that turned many of my ideas about the so-called “elites” of the region where I live upside down.

This kind of hospital situations is old.

The series “General Hospital”, for example, has been on the air for 58 years without interruption and has accumulated more than 14,000 episodes.

But the white coat series took a turn in the 90s when "ER, Emergency Room" incorporated

clinical

casuistry

into the plots.

What set “Grey's Anatomy apart is the frenzied lovemaking activity of the medical staff, from residents to specialists.

An American TV commentator defined the series as a cross between "ER" and "Sex in the city."

How would an ultra-conservative audience, not to say "oppressed by patriarchal machismo", react to the morals and sexual habits of a Colombian Meredith Gray?

Would Bogota's Meredith Gray go to bed with a perfect stranger in the first episode?

This was the overriding concern, well justified from his experience as a super-successful soap opera scriptwriter, by Fernando Gaitán, a drama consultant for the local production company.

I remember my impression when reading the scripts of Shonda Rhimes, author of the series: they are a model for those who want to learn something of the trade.

In particular, I was struck by Rhimes's treatment of the dramatization of clinical cases.

The author on many occasions limits herself to writing "

insert a case of immune deficiency involving the child of the Salvadoran waitress. The waitress hooks up with the newly arrived neomunologist. The pulmonologist is also the" toy boy "of the largest shareholder. child inevitably dies, romance does not reach adulthood

".

A dozen co-writers had to turn the above into scenes and dialogue.

In a very singular way it caught my attention that, after a few days of work, the team of young Colombian writers under my charge began to engage in discussions on public health and social protection policies.

The analysis of many medical cases raised in the original series forced to put them under the lens of the life of the dispossessed majorities of our continent.

I was enthusiastic about his concerns, which I quickly made my own.

What could be the ideal hospital for a realistically Latin American hospital drama?

If we chose a sophisticated private hospital, we ran the risk of alienating the "strata" - a very Colombian voice, by the way - from the show.

On the other hand, placing the love life of inmates in a pitiful Latin American public hospital, with obsolete facilities and faulty medical equipment, with a shortage of medicines and clinical supplies, could be gruesome.

The so-called "walk of death", in which a patient is rejected from the emergency room of several clinics and ends up dying without receiving assistance because he is not affiliated with a "health promotion company". the first episode.

Wouldn't it be better to produce a loving “docudrama” whose protagonist is a traveling staff member of the Pan American Health Organization who arrives in Colombia and meets an underpaid public physician who selflessly treats patients below the poverty line, rather than a glamorous fiction romantic relationship between successful young interns who aspire to join an elite of specialists?

We ended up figuring out a clinical center that was probably halfway to Seattle Grace from "Grey's Anatomy" and a derelict public hospital called "San Judas."

In our fiction, the “San Judas” was to be renovated and equipped with state-of-the-art medical equipment thanks to a “pilot plan” of the Inter-American Development Bank and ANDI.

A hospital recovery program.

Hence the name of the series.

They did not like the idea, they found it very convoluted;

perhaps too social democratic in election season.

From then on, I lost my footing and things didn't get any better for me.

Finally, the production company decided to intervene in the project and I chose to withdraw altogether.

The advisor came to the rescue with the wisdom of a veteran chief surgeon of services.

After a radical restructuring, the case of coastal priapism was suppressed, the concern for the finances of the hospital ceased and the Meredith from Bogotá did not go to bed with a stranger in the first episode, although she did save many lives.

After many misunderstandings and love pains, she became very happy next to a neurosurgeon, also renamed him.

The medical soap opera ended up being one of the most resounding continental hits on local television.

It usually happens to you as a screenwriter: you learn a lot working on things that never make it to the screen.