Episode Report Card Miss Alli: B+ | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT So Long, My Lovelies
By Miss Alli | Season 16 | Episode 6 | Aired on 03.12.2008
So here we are at Jonathan's medical check, which is, for some reason, taking place in the middle of the woods. That part, I do not understand. I mean, they've got him sitting on a purple mat, kind of, but...come on. Is this the best you can do if we're opening up the stitches to look at them? I don't know. The doctor is a woman who's dressed like a park ranger, weirdly, complete with the walkie-talkie on her belt. The rest of Airai stands by looking tense, especially Eliza, whose eyebrows are thoroughly knitted. The doctor asks Jonathan if he has any pain in his groin. He wants to say no; you can tell he does, and he almost says it. But when she presses lightly and asks if it's a bit tender, he admits that yes, it's a little tender. So those are his lymph nodes being affected, as you well know if you are kind of a hypochondriac. And then we see the wound, which has a nasty white ooze dribbling from it, all around the stitches, and which is bright red all around. You can also see how swollen the entire knee is, and you just know that hurt like hell just walking around, let alone dragging your ass through a bamboo cage.
The doctor knows he's going to want to fight her; she's starting with an obvious tone of, "Okay, look," in her voice, like he's already protesting. She points out that there's a "big abscess" in his knee. He needs IV antibiotics. He needs surgery, pretty much immediately, just to clean out the infection he already has. "It's not going to be a quick fix," she says. And he looks around miserably and says, "Ah, God...bless it." Heh. Nice save. And now we see that Probst is sitting there, just over Jonathan's shoulder. Jonathan has an outbreak of stubbornness now, and he says, not entirely convincingly, "I'm not quittin'." The doctor can't technically make him do anything -- though the show undoubtedly can throw him out, and my guess is that they probably would have, if he'd really refused medical advice at this stage, hesitant as they'd be to deal with the horrifying publicity if a guy died of a systemic infection originating with a knee injury he suffered at a challenge they built. So she just says, "I can only recommend that you get treatment in hospital, for the sake of your knee. Antibiotics are not working at this stage. It's showing signs of spreading around your body. It's moved up into your lymph nodes. It can make you really, really sick, okay? An infection that goes into your bloodstream is potentially fatal," she says. And now you know why I badgered and badgered a friend of mine into going to Urgent Care for what literally started as a hangnail and wound up making his finger turn green. Do not fuck around with infections, y'all. Do not. I had a wee little infection of unknown origin in my eye a month or so ago (I blame the gigantic Petri dish that is the train), which made me look briefly as if I'd been punched in the face (write your own joke; you know you want to -- I'll wait), and just for that, I was on antibiotics, four times a day, for a week. They get pretty aggressively after these things these days.
Jonathan looks at the doctor, anguished. Unless I miss my guess, part of what he's thinking here is, "The thing is, if I die, my awesome wife will kick my ass." And this is where he tears up, because he knows it's over. And he can't solve it, and he can't get around it; it is what it is, and there's only one smart thing left to do, and he really, really, really doesn't want to do it. Even Parvati looks like she's about to tear up over there with the rest of the group, which is so funny, because they do not like each other. But almost like honor among thieves, nobody wants it to be like this. And Eliza looks at Alexis, whose eyes are questioning, and Eliza's eyes are depressingly certain.