Entertainment

Doctors brace themselves for parade season in ‘NY ER’

Working in a New York City emergency room means having the summer parade schedule memorized and not being shy about giving celebrities rectal exams.

Dr. Debbie Yi, chief resident in emergency medicine at New York-Presbyterian Hospital, tells The Post that the parades are busy days in the ER because drunken revelers lead to accidents, overdoses and sometimes violence.

The premiere episode of Discovery Fit & Health’s “NY ER” opened last week with a drunk reveler from the annual St. Patrick’s Day parade being wheeled into New York-Presbyterian Hospital with a head trauma.

“We call that status post-St. Patrick’s Day shenanigans,” ER nurse Katie Duke tells the camera. “He got intoxicated during the festivities. He fell and hit his head, and sustained a head bleed.”

“We know the parade schedule for the summer, whether you’re working uptown at Columbia or downtown at Cornell,” Yi says. “So, when you’re working uptown at Columbia, you know exactly what day the Puerto Rican Day Parade is and what day the Dominican Day Parade is.

“If you’re working downtown, you know that St. Patty’s Day is going to be huge,” she says. “You’re going to get some runoff from Brooklyn from the West Indian parade. And there are things you don’t even expect to erupt in the ER, like SantaCon [a Christmas bar crawl]. I mean, there were drunk Santas everywhere.”

Another type of New York patient they must be prepared for is the celebrity. Yi says that she rarely recognizes the VIPs she treats because her work schedule doesn’t leave much time for TV or movies, and she thinks it is better that way because she never gets star struck.

“You want to treat them like every other person, because you want to go through your whole pathway of what do you think is going on,” Yi says about celebs who may come in with a mystery illness.

“For example, a big part of emergency medicine is that we do a lot of rectal exams, and if you were to forego the rectal exam, you could be missing a part of your physical exam.

“I think people tread lightly with stuff like that when celebrities come into the emergency room, and I really think that’s a disservice.”

When the ER doctors and nurses aren’t juggling VIPs and drunken parade goers, they’re dealing with a lot of “pedestrian struck” cases, a New York standard.

“We get a lot of traumas that are very atypical, because there are cars everywhere and people walking everywhere,” Yi says. “A majority of our traumas are people getting struck by low-speed vehicles.”

“NY ER,” which airs Saturday nights, is a spinoff of the ABC summer documentary show “NY Med.” The ABC series featured the medical staff and patients of New York-Presbyterian Hospital and Lutheran Medical Center in Brooklyn, while this new series focuses on only the emergency rooms of those hospitals.