‘ER’ grad now scrubs for ‘Miami Medical’
As a property med-tech on “Miami Medical,” Michael Goto handles everything from operating tools to prosthetic internal organs. But he didn’t learn his trade from medical school; he learned it from “ER.”
“I get a lot of people asking me if I’m a doctor,” he said. “But I guess after seven years working on ‘ER,’ you become kind of like a journeyman doctor. What’s scary is I can do a lot of these procedures, like thoracotomies, tracheotomies. I haven’t, but if I needed to, I would know how to do them.”
The Pasadena native calls himself “one of those wanted to be a fireman kind of kids.” But he discovered his true calling one day when he was playing an online video game. “It was Call of Duty, one of these war games that you play online,” he recalled. “And I met one of the prop masters for ‘ER’ playing this game. He invited me on the set, and the rest is history. I never left.”
Now, Goto is bringing his expertise to “Miami Medical,” which premieres on CBS on April 2. He adds his special touch to car explosions, hand amputations, brain surgeries and more.
“It’ll start from a concept meeting and go from there,” he said. “We’ll find out what we can and can’t do, what our budget is and what the director wants to see. We have an hour show, and they want to show a six-hour operation, so we need to cut this down. That’s where I step in.”
Rhythm and views: Setting up medical props goes beyond arranging scalpels on a tray. “All the monitors that you see or that I handle actually work,” said Goto. “If it’s what the director wants, we’ll hook the actors up directly to one of the heart monitors. But if not, we’ll simulate heart rhythms, breathing, all kinds of good stuff. If they go into defib or whatnot, we have to simulate a flat line in the mid- dle of the scene. No mat- ter how good of an actor you are, you can’t fake that and then bring it back for a retake.”
Sinking feeling: The operating rooms in “Miami Medical” don’t have the firmest mattresses. “A thoracotomy is when they open up the midpart of the body to gain access to organs like the lungs and heart. We had a prosthetic made to fit the actor, and that prosthetic actually had a cavity in it where we could put blood and lungs and stuff like that. And we put the actor in a sunken bed, so he was not upright. And then we could put the prosthetic on so he looked more normal.”
Thinking cap: Goto’s job isn’t brain surgery -- but it sure can look like it. “That’s another prosthetic,” he explained. “We don’t have to deal with the hair, because they would shave the head in surgery. So it’s a cap that we’ll put on top of the head. The brain is underneath the skull-looking cap. And then we’ll use surgical towels, and we’ll show just the parts they need to see, like the top of the head where they’re going to work. We’ll cover everything else, but the face will be exposed. But the head won’t look oblong. It’ll look normal just by the camera angle.”
Making the cut: For some shots, actors slice into the carefully crafted prosthetics. “We’ll use a dull scalpel, and they just follow the line of a pre-cut seam,” Goto explained. “There’s a little bulb on the end of the scalpel that they hide with their hand. So then when they’re cutting, they squeeze this bulb, and the blood starts coming out of the end of the scalpel. And our syringes have retractable needles on them, so when they’re pushing them into the skin, it looks like they’re going into the skin. We just have all kinds of good stuff like that.”
Spilling their guts: Being a property med-tech is a dirty business. “I try to stay away from the blood. But we use so much blood that it gets on me. One time, I worked all night and had blood all over me because we did this airplane scene, and I needed to get gas for my car. So I’m getting out of this car covered in fake blood, and people are just, like, looking at me like, ‘What is this guy? Did he just kill somebody?’ And then I look at myself, and I’m like, ‘These people must think I’m just some psycho killer, and I’m standing at a gas station, pump- ing gas in my car.’ But that was good times. Only in L.A. . . .”