Last night’s Chicago Med was heartbreaking on all fronts. Even though we had a quick Jay Halstead appearance — and that always makes me smile — the three main storylines did not have a happy ending.
Following up on these past couple of episodes, Robin went in for a psychiatric evaluation. As you all remember, she had been hearing things that weren’t there and, last week, Dr. Charles convinced her to see a doctor so they could get her checked out.
Connor and Dr. Charles are definitely concerned about her, but she keeps assuring them both that she’s fine and that she will be okay by herself.
Dr. Charles, however, can’t let it go, so he pulls some strings to have Reese be the resident to do her evaluation. She takes it as an honor at first, but quickly realizes that he may have done that because she is his student and that way he could have access to his daughter’s case.
We don’t get to see much of Robin’s evaluation, but we get Dr. Charles’ point of view and how he is increasingly worried about her, especially when she doesn’t share much of what happened during her time with Reese.
So he tries to access his student’s notes about Robin in the system, but Reese hasn’t posted anything there yet. Thinking she is somehow trying to keep stuff from him, he meets up with Robin for a cup of coffee and, when she tells him that she should be good to go by the end of the day, he panics.
He knows she’s not well and he needs to do something to ensure that she gets the best possible care. So he does the worst thing he could have possibly done — he steals her keys and goes over to her apartment without her permission.
When he gets there, he’s met with a scary sight. There are rat traps everywhere and Robin has basically destroyed her apartment in an effort to find the rodents she keeps hearing on her walls.
Things are way worse than he thought, so he goes back to Med and makes his daughter get checked in to the psych ward by force.
It’s understandable why he did it, but he went about it all wrong. When Reese confronts him, she is furious.
She had been making progress with Robin and she had nearly convinced her to check herself in voluntarily, but Dr. Charles hadn’t trusted that she could do her job and went behind her back, ruining all the work she had done.
The last scene where Dr. Charles is just sitting at the cafeteria by himself is just heartbreaking, because he was just trying to help his child and he made everything worse.
That ties in to Connor’s case of the week. A pregnant woman arrives at the hospital with her family and she can’t breathe. The case starts getting difficult when she refuses to get an X-ray because it might hurt the baby.
Her daughter has stage 4 leukemia and the baby is a perfect match, so he can’t be harmed in any way, even if that means she is making herself worse.
When Dr. Rhodes tells her that she’s in heart failure and they need to terminate the pregnancy because her body just can’t withstand the strain the baby is putting her heart through, she absolutely refuses.
Terminating the pregnancy means her daughter is going to die. The doctors only gave her one more year to live and, if she loses the baby now, they won’t have enough time to get pregnant again and her chance of being cured are over.
So she doesn’t care what happens to her, as long as the baby survives to give her daughter some of his bone marrow.
It’s an incredibly hard case and it’s just so heart wrenching. It’s her child; of course she is going to do anything to save her, even if that means she has to die in the process.
She doesn’t care what happens, she just needs to save her kid. Things deteriorate incredibly fast and Connor tells her she only has the surgical option that would put her on bypass.
But that could harm the baby, so she absolutely refuses to do it. If she doesn’t do it, they would need to entubate her and she would slip into a coma and would never wake up again.
Her daughter is desperate. When she doesn’t feel well and Natalie checks her out, she tells Nat that she doesn’t want her mom doing this. That it’s not fair that she’s getting all the attention at the expense of her mother’s health and her little brothers’ lives.
Her 3-year-old brother Sam already doesn’t get any attention from his parents and she is terrified of what this baby’s life is going to be like if all they want is for him to save her.
The mother’s condition deteriorates really fast and it comes to a time that they have to make a decision. She is determined to sacrifice her life for her children, but the little girl begs her mother not to do it.
Connor, then, offers the option of doing the surgery without putting her on bypass. It’s an extremely risky procedure and the odds of both mother and baby making it are extremely low. She agrees to that and they take her up to surgery.
It’s touch and go for a while, but she makes it through. The baby, however, didn’t survive the surgery and when Connor breaks the news to her, my heart broke in tiny little pieces for this family. This show really has the ability to mess with our emotions.
While all that was happening, Nina is getting increasingly jealous of Will and Nat. When she gets to the hospital and sees them laughing together, she just about goes over the edge.
So when Natalie loses a patient and Nina is the one doing the autopsy, she catches a pulmonary embolism that Nat missed and that, ultimately, was the cause of death.
So instead of just putting her report in the mail box like she would have done with any other doctor, she personally goes down to the ED to deliver the report in person.
Natalie is obviously devastated that she missed it and she talks to Will about it. He comforts her, telling her that even if she had caught it, they wouldn’t have been able to save him, so she shouldn’t beat herself up over it.
When she tells him that Nina had just delivered the report and that’s why it had been done so fast, Will immediately knows something is up.
He confronts Nina about it and she gets pissed off, but later admits that she is jealous and that she feels they are growing apart.
Will tells her that he will try harder and he seems determined to save his relationship. It’s a sinking ship, though, and we all know it. Even Natalie knows it.
He talks to Nat about it and tells her that Nina was jealous of their relationship, but he is caught completely off guard when Natalie asks if they’re really just good friends.
And damn it, Will, this was your chance! We all know he is head over heels for Nat – hell, even Nina knows! — and he didn’t do anything about it. God, you’re an idiot, Will Halstead.
I mean, I understand why he said that that’s all they are because I know he doesn’t want to cheat and he doesn’t want to hurt Nina’s feelings, but he could have said something.
That said, now that Natalie has acknowledged the fact that there is something between them and it’s special and they are definitely not just good friends, I am absolutely sure that it will stick with Will and he won’t be able to think about anything else.
Even if he’s trying hard to save his relationship with Nina, we all know this was doomed from the start.
Now, I’ve seen people freaking out about the fact that Nat went to a hockey game with Jay. When Will decided to spend some time with Nina, he canceled his plans with his brother.
So the next person Jay saw was Natalie, so he invited her to go with him, so the tickets wouldn’t go to waste.
And that’s all there was to it, people. Calm down.
Jay is not coming on to Natalie and they are not going to hook up, simply because it doesn’t make any sense. We have gotten to know Jay for the past four seasons and, from what we know, he would never do that to his brother.
He and Will seem to be pretty close and I’m sure Jay knows all about Will’s feelings for Nat. Of course he wouldn’t go there.
And let’s not forget, the guy has been crazy about Erin Lindsay for four years. They took a break so he could work through his issues and PTSD, but that doesn’t mean he doesn’t love her anymore and that he is just going to jump into bed with the woman his brother is crazy about.
I mean, come on, TPTB would never do that. Effectively ruining the main ships from both shows? Yeah, no. Not going to happen. Sorry. You’re freaking out over nothing.
Nat just happened to be there, they get along fine and they went to a hockey game together to hang out. That’s all there was to it. They’re friends and I’m sure it’s a great opportunity for Nat to get some insight of what’s going on in Will’s head.
And that’s it. Chill.
Chicago Med: Other things of note
1. I loved that Ethan didn’t go easy on Noah. That kid is so spoiled, it tends to be annoying. I like him, but he always wants to take the easy way out and he put his sister in an awful position.
When she knocked some sense into him and he figured out the case on his own, he saw that he has potential and most likely got the residency spot by his own merit and not because someone helped him.
2. Manstead feels. My god, these two are so cute together, even when Will is being an idiot and I wanted to knock him over the head. The chemistry between Nick Gehlfuss and Torrey DeVitto is amazing.
Chicago Med airs every Thursday at 10/9c on NBC.