I need the address of a Chicago alderman....

....because I want to lobby for a one-hundred percent budget decrease for County Hospital.

That's right: I'm done with ER. I've made no secret that I've been bored for some time with the show. For God's sake, Nurse Sam and her brat kid are the least interesting characters in the entire history of series television, and I say that as someone who as a kid actually watched that spin-off show about Enos from The Dukes of Hazzard. Watching Dr. Kovac pine for this self-absorbed train wreck of a woman is just mind-numbingly dull, and I'm finally tired of the show's fourth or fifth iteration of bringing in a bunch of new med students who will be taught by the current batch of docs who were the new med students three seasons ago, before those docs left for other hospitals (and their actors for other shows). As much as I love Maura Tierney and Parminder Nagra, I'm just not interested in watching them learn the same life lessons about being an ER doc that Drs. Pratt, Carter, and all the others already learned.

But that was all the mounting sense of boredom. Last night's episode of ER actually made me angry, and angry's not something I need in great supply right now.

Without going into gory detail, the episode's main medical storyline involved a woman who was carrying a baby as a surrogate mother for a couple who have been unable to conceive. The pregnant woman, already in labor, wants very much to have the baby vaginally, but the infant turns out to have moved into a breech-birth position. At this point, everybody and their brother -- including the annoying "young gun" doctor played by Shane West (a very talented actor who was far better served by the infinitely superior scripts of Once and Again) -- starts lobbying this woman to have a Caesarian section, to the point where the father-to-be is making noises about getting a court order to force the surrogate mom to have the C-section.

Well, she doesn't have the C-section, and in the course of labor and delivery the infant's umbilical cord is compressed, resulting in oxygen deprivation. Upon delivery, the infant has to be intubated and is whisked off to the NICU, since it's established as being basically brain-dead. The father and mother depart without their child, and the surrogate mom apparently doesn't want the child either.

Alert readers may sense that this subject matter was, for me, uncomfortably close to what played out when Little Quinn was born. But that's the problem: many of the events depicted in the episode stand in absolute contrast to what our real-life experience actually was, to the extent that the ER show struck me as being almost dishonest. To wit:

:: There seems to be a perception today -- tacitly endorsed by last night's ER -- that a C-section is a fairly benign procedure which should be invoked at any sign of difficulty at all. The fact is, a C-section is an invasive surgical procedure that is not the cure-all that ER implied it was. The episode's constant implication that if only this stupid woman had consented to the Caesarian, her baby would have been born healthy is simply not true.

:: The episode was billed in previews as a "turning point" for the Shane West character (who's so unmemorable that I can't even remember the character's name), which strikes me as odd since the Shane West character had a "turning point" last year when he was on the scene of an accident at a party when an overloaded balcony collapsed. But he had one moment that was so stunningly awful that I can't believe any doctor would behave that way: after the baby is delivered and placed in the bassinet for intubation, the surrogate mother asks how he is, and Shane West snaps at her, "He's not breathing and he has no pulse. What does that tell you?" This was absolutely disgusting.

:: And quite frankly, I find the whole "Stupid woman ignoring the Knowledgable Male Doctor to her detriment" subtext of the episode unsettling.

:: After Little Quinn was born to quite similar circumstances as the baby on the show, it took more than a week before it was conclusively determined that he was brain damaged, and even then, there was no way of telling just how severe the resultant disabilities would be (or even what those disabilities were). On ER, the docs made their conclusive diagnosis of hopeless brain damage within hours. Little Quinn was on a ventilator for over a week before he was strong enough to breathe on his own; ER made it sound like a hopeless defeat that the hours-old newborn was still on the machine.

I could go on, but I won't. Suffice it to say that this show, whose long decline from unmissable staple of my Thursday nights to a boring shell of what it once was, is over for me. For my medical-TV fix, I'll still have House and, when it returns in mid-season, Scrubs.

So long, ER. It was a good nine years or so.