This was by far the most emotional and thought provoking episode ever…. the one with the train crash and carnage…
The grossest thing ever, was this man and a woman, perfect strangers, who were skewered together, face to face, on a metal pole. The problem was, both couldn’t be operated at the same time together, yet the one who was first removed from the pole (so that the other person could be operated upon) would be first to die. The problem of course, was, how does one go about determining who dies? How do we choose?
Let’s say, medically speaking, the person with the better prognosis for recovery or survival should be operated on… but if you considered the problem from an different perspective, like who could contribute more to society in future, or who was economically more worthwhile, or even who had more 内涵… there’d be so many grey areas and no definite lines…
And then of course, there was this subplot where a seemingly perfectly healthy woman yammering on her mobile, complaining and walking around with lots of energy suddenly collapses and dies from an internal bleed. We never really know what’s going to happen are we? Probably reminds us to be even more observant of people, even if they’re not a patient? Or is it just telling us to ‘expect the unexpected’? Or perhaps, it’s just highlighting the fact that doctors are not omniscent and omnipotent?
Cristina provided quite a bit of sadistic comic relief in the episode where she would only be allowed to scrub in for an operation to internally fixate and rejoin a severed leg when she found the leg… In her hurry to not ‘lose her scrubs’, she haphazardly retrieved a woman’s leg, prompting the surgeon to remark how his patient must have gotten out of bed, decided to save his one leg that day and put on red nail polish. Then, she is also decidedly rude to the paramedics. She even attempts to enlist her boyfriend, head of surgery, to help retrieve the leg.
Her actions make me feel quite disappointed in her. I’m very sure this happens to all of us some time or another. We are so focused on ourselves and this game of survival in the hospital (trust me, it’s not easy to live within the clinical hierachy), that we place the patients’ interests secondary. It’s an ugly sight indeed. Also, actually at one point I was thinking, was it that imperative to retrieve the leg? In the face of such massive carnage, I was pretty sure there would be other people more desperately in need of help. Just like Alex said, that man can live without his leg.
So how justifiable is it to use up hospital resources for him?
