Netflix ER Drama Pulse Shines by Including Authentic Disability Representation

As a team of injured soccer players is brought into the emergency room on stretchers, Harper Simms rolls next to one of the teenagers to evaluate him. “Call neurosurgery. Let me get ahead to set up for an airway,” she calls as she pushes her wheelchair into the trauma bay.

Jessy Yates plays Harper Simms, a second-year emergency medicine resident, in Pulse, Netflix’s new medical drama that follows the lives of doctors and staff at Miami’s busiest Level I trauma center. The series has plenty of drama, romance and medical procedures, but what makes it stand out from similar shows is the inclusion of a wheelchair-using doctor, expertly played by Yates.

 “As disabled people we are so used to seeing stories that don’t reflect our experience, but the showrunners got it in a way that I have never experienced,” says Yates, who, like her character, is a wheelchair user.

While developing the role of Harper, the Pulse creative team consulted with physicians who use wheelchairs. Yates got to shadow one of them, Dr. Daniel Grossman, an emergency medicine physician at the Mayo Clinic who has a spinal cord injury. Yates witnessed the adaptations Dr. Grossman makes, like how he intubates patients. “When you are intubating a patient, they are slightly too high on the bed to reach them, so Dr. Grossman pulls them onto his lap and puts a blanket behind their head, and that’s what my character ends up doing,” says Yates. “It became this vulnerable, intimate thing because you have someone who can’t breathe on your lap, and you are helping to administer their breaths. It feels less clinical.”

While watching Dr. Grossman interact with patients, Yates realized that being a wheelchair user was, in a way, his superpower. “So much of emergency medicine is detective work. You have to figure out what could have gotten them there,” says Yates. “When you are standing over a patient, it can feel more like an authoritarian type of interaction, but when you are sitting, it becomes a conversation. His patients opened up to him so quickly as a provider because they felt comfortable.”

Pulse captures how hectic and fast-paced working in an emergency room is. It can be hard for doctors and staff to take care of their own physical needs, like having to pee. In one episode, a timer goes off on Harper’s phone reminding her to use the bathroom. Setting a timer is something suggested by another of the show’s consultants, Dr. Allison Kessler, a disabled physician at Shirley Ryan AbilityLab. When Harper finally has a moment to get to the bathroom, someone is using the only accessible stall, so she has to wait. Then after Harper transfers onto the toilet, she realizes that she doesn’t have any catheters on her — a moment that a lot of catheter users can probably relate to.

Pulse also addresses the ableism Harper faces as a disabled doctor. When Harper enters the examination room of a child with a broken arm, the parents stare at her uncomfortably. The parents’ question everything Harper does to help their child, and ask for a “real doctor.”

Yates is thankful that Pulse’s showrunners didn’t shy away from tackling topics like this. She was leery at first of what a “TV version” of the story might be, and wanted to be honest with viewers. She is happy with the product and its creators. “They were never interested in just sticking a character in a chair and then just assuming that it would be a normal experience, because it wouldn’t be.”

All 10 episodes of Pulse are available to watch on Netflix.