"Painfully Close To Home"
John McKay

For Megan Follows, the intrusion of a real-life drama turned the filming of her new medical thriller Open Heart into a surreal and stressful experience that hit painfully close to home.

In the film, Follows plays a whistle-blowing nurse in a hospital where an unusual number of babies are dying on the operating table.

While she was in Saint John, N.B., shooting scenes for Open Heart, her teenage daughter was in Toronto's Hospital for Sick Children and Follows found herself flying back and forth -- living every parent's nightmare.

"My daughter had been misdiagnosed by another hospital and I was extremely grateful for the Sick Children's Hospital, which is one of the best hospitals in the world," she says.

"And I was grateful for the nurses, I'll tell you. That's absolutely true. They're the ones doing the care. And it was very surreal."

Although she'll be known forever as little Anne Shirley from the Anne of Green Gables TV movies, the Los Angeles-based actor is now 36 with two children of her own, a 10-year-old son and a daughter, 14.

Follows says her private life is sacred and declined to elaborate on the Sick Kids incident, other than to say that she had obviously experienced from a highly personal point of view what her film's character was going through.

In Open Heart, she plays pediatric nurse Sherry Cardinal, who slowly comes to the conclusion that her hospital's hotshot new cardiac surgeon is not all he's cracked up to be. While renowned for research and fundraising, the operating room technique of Dr. Allan Kenning (Raoul Bhaneja) soon has him in way over his head as several of his tiny patients expire. And the administration staff is not about to admit it has made a terrible mistake.

So Cardinal, not entirely stable emotionally (she has a drinking problem, too), must decide whether to raise alarms or keep quiet and save her job in a world where surgeons are gods and troublemakers are sent on their way.

"The character was always a little prickly and that's really what I loved about her was her defects," Follows says. "It makes it far more interesting to play. Life isn't really black and white, very rarely."

Indeed, Dr. Kenning himself is not a villain outright, he's just under a lot of pressure to live up to his reputation.

The screenplay by Raymond Storey (Butterbox Babies) is described as "inspired" by real events in Canada and the U.K. Follows says that sadly, such incidents in pediatric cardiovascular surgery are not isolated, but wasn't able to get specific.

"There are elements of litigation that come into it which is why it became 'inspired' by events," she says.

But if underfunding is the underlying problem, Follows says, she's not about to criticize socialized medicine or the Canadian health-care system in particular, not after what she's seen first- hand in the U.S.

"I've seen people who have no health care and I've seen lineups in downtown Los Angeles where people who've got gunshot wounds won't get seen because they don't have coverage."

Follows says there's a message to parents, that they shouldn't accept at face value what a doctor or a hospital plans to do to their children and that they should get a second opinion.

"Yeah, have a voice. Speak out. You can't make certain assumptions anymore."

Source: The Province