Wouldn’t it be great if, at the end of the day, the patients got up and went home healthy? It happens just that way in the very real Hollywood world of Erinn Tracie Brown, RN—at least when she’s working as a technical adviser for nursing on television and movie sets.

“At the end, I rip off the fake trachs. Nobody is sick. I don’t have to tell somebody’s family that their family member has died, which I’ve had to do many times,” said Brown, a nurse of more than eight years.

Her big break in show business proves that it’s not always what you know, but who you know. Her mother, a labor and delivery nurse, delivered the baby of a prop master at Warner Bros. Studios, and when he later came calling for a technical adviser, Brown’s mother suggested her. “That’s how I fell into it,” Brown said.

Of course, it’s what she knows, too, and much of that is from seven years at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center, Hollywood’s hospital to the stars. Brown, 31, recently joined Kaiser Permanente Woodland Hills Medical Center, Kaiser’s premier neurology facility in Southern California.

“The good thing about Cedars, I must say I learned a lot,” Brown said. Besides four years on the neurology unit, she worked as a float nurse covering diabetes, hemodialysis, ICU, telemetry and maternal health. Knowing a little bit about everything makes for a better technical adviser, she said.

Among Brown’s credits are a now-canceled Warner Bros. series, “Dead Last,” in which her neurology experience was invaluable to an actor who played a patient in a coma, and the birthing scenes in a made-for-television movie about Mary Kay Letourneau, the Seattle schoolteacher who became sexually involved with one of her pupils.

Authenticity is critical.

Directors have asked for everything from the symptoms of appendicitis to what drugs might be ordered when a patient’s condition worsens in the operating room. They also look to her for how a nurse should act and what she should be doing in any number of crises.

In setting up an emergency room, Brown said, “I had to make sure there was enough lighting and that there was a crash cart near. I had to teach the actors how to use a bovie, the cauterizing tube. Even though they weren’t using it for real, just to show them the action of your hand.”

Intensive care involved faking tracheotomies and IV lines, as well as ensuring a lifelike unit with appropriate heart monitors and oxygen tanks, she said.

Hollywood always has been in Brown’s heart, if not in her sights. She’s a native of Simi Valley, a Los Angeles suburb, and had the goal of working at Cedars-Sinai even as she left the Army after two years as a medic and earned her nursing degree at Pikes Peak Community College in Colorado Springs, Colo. “I figured once I got Cedars on my résumé, I could work anywhere I wanted to,” Brown said.

Neurology care still gets top billing with her. “I’m staying in the acute setting in neuro because that’s what interests me most,” caring for patients undergoing surgery for brain tumors, spinal problems, head trauma and stroke.

The neurology unit at Cedars-Sinai is on the top floor of the hospital. “Even a celebrity who did not have a neurological disorder would go to the eighth floor because that was the penthouse, with the extra giant rooms and the fine china, and you could have lobster,” Brown said.

She shies away from talking about caring for celebrities, except in the most general terms and only when their illnesses have been widely reported. Such was the case with Elizabeth Taylor, who had brain surgery. “She had a very good outcome,” Brown said.

“I also took care of Steven Spielberg and he was an excellent patient. The perfect patient. That’s when he had his kidney removed. Whatever we asked him to do, he did it. He just wanted to get well and go home.

“Most of the celebrities I’ve taken care of have been good,” Brown said. “I don’t treat them any differently than I do anybody else because I don’t get starstruck. Maybe that’s what they respect.

“Most of the patients that give you a hard time are run-of-the-mill folks,” she said.

Brown said she recently turned down a technical adviser assignment because of the demands of orientation at Kaiser. But that kind of work, as well as earning a bachelor’s degree, are in her future, she said.

“For the cameramen and the directors, that’s their job that they do all the time. For me, it’s a vacation from real patient care. It’s fun for me. It’s like getting paid to play.”

Contact Phil McPeck at getpjm@aol.com.