JazzVibe

I was so looking forward to the show and then our almost 18 year old cat died a sudden and grossly dramatic death.  A cat is not the same as my children, but when I could focus on the show I kept drawing parallels between the show and what had just happened.  Kitty had been ill for a couple of years and just the day before I had made arrangements for her to be put down, but she seemed to rally and I put it off.  We'd gone to extraordinary lengths to keep her going, and now I wonder if we had done her any favors.  I don't think so, and now Kitty is gone and I'm feeling guilty and selfish for putting it off for so long.  The idea of having to make similar decisions about one of my children is terrifying.

I'll have to watch the show again to pick up on what I missed, but it seems that the parents had reached the point where they were wondering if they were doing the right thing by keeping their son alive.  They were looking into euthanasia via the Netherlands.  Were they planning to move there and establish residency?  I can't imagine that anyone could just show up there and get euthanasia performed like it was a weekend jaunt that just happened to end with their son dying.  Without the son being able to speak for himself, would his school report on the quality of life vs life at all costs be enough to let them proceed?  Were they thinking of ending their son's life themselves in the UK?  I missed all of that if it was discussed on the show because I was distracted.

To find out that Nurse Lorraine did the murders was a surprise to me, I was expecting to find that the blue haired girl had done it because I thought that the son was trying to impress her when he got injured. 

Instead, I think that Lorraine was insane.  She'd enjoyed sparring with the doctor, thinking she was the power behind the throne, and relished her nickname as the 'backseat surgeon'.  She might have been in love with the doctor since she didn't mind him calling her his 'work wife'.  But then he got married and didn't pay attention to her anymore.  So she grabbed onto the what happened to the boy and inserted herself into the situation.  She encouraged the guy who was once engaged to the doctors new wife to file a complaint about the surgery even though she wasn't there.  She didn't know if the doctor was drunk or not, I don't think she cared anymore; she just wanted to punish the doctor for not paying attention to her anymore.  She accused the doctor of playing God, but she herself played God by committing murders and didn't see that she was doing the same thing.

Nurse Lorraine killed the guy she set up for the doctor's murder (again, I missed the part about how she managed to do that), because she was sure that he'd soon figure out what had really happened.  When the boy's father killed himself she orchestrated a cover up to try to make that death look like murder.  Did she want the mother to get the insurance payout, or did she want the boy to continue to exist so she could point to him and convince herself that she was doing the right thing with her campaign of vengeance?

I guess that the mother will spend the rest of her life caring for her son (isn't he brain-dead?) until he suffers the fate that many patients in that condition succumb to.  Pneumonia is a common cause of death for patients like that, I've heard.  Something about their bodies not moving around and having pockets of fluid build up in the lungs.  I guess the mother will continue to get state sponsored visiting nurses in the meantime.  This is truly not a happy ending for the boy or his mother, but I don't know what the answer would be.  If the boy is truly brain-dead, maybe it would be better to donate any healthy organs to others and let him die on the operating table.  I just hope that any conversations about such things are held out of hearing range of him just in case there is a tiny chance that he's sometimes aware of what's going on.

With all the sadness surrounding this story, I couldn't get really engaged in the interactions and possible future conflicts about Lewis being the subordinate to Hathaway and the implications of what having Lewis going back to work will do to his relationship with Dr. Hobson.

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