Episode Report Card Heathen: B | Grade It Now! YOU GRADE IT Beyond Repair
By Heathen | Season 8 | Episode 11 | Aired on 01.09.2002
Douglas is still alone, playing "Nobody Knows The Trouble I Seen" on the guitar of our heartstrings. Abby kindly sits down and offers to buy him some pizza or a hamburger. "Mom says fast food isn't good for you," he answers sweetly. Abby catches herself mid-eye-roll and lies that hospital fast food is fortified with nutrients. Eagerly, Douglas accepts her offer of French fries -- after all, if his mother turns out to be gone forever, he can use them to build a crude potato replica. Abby scurries to Frank and hisses that he'd better work harder and faster at finding Dougie's mother because he's been waiting for a few hours now. "If I find his Mom, can I have the hockey tickets you pinched off the stiff?" Frank whispers sensitively. Abby refuses. Gallant rushes in looking for Luka, because Miranda's blood pressure plummeted. Abby runs toward the trauma room.
In Trauma Green, Abby and Gallant prep some oxygen and dopamine for Miranda, whose heart sounds are muffled. Gallant makes a diagnosis that I don't understand because I'm ignorant; apparently, they'd figured Miranda had a blood clot, but Gallant just figured out that it was something else. Gallant gloves up to assist Luka, who has just entered, and Abby is already working frantically on the other side.
Frank bursts in with the mixed news that he found Douglas's mother: sporting a different surname, a Belinda Matheson arrived with a headache last night that turned out to be a brain bleed. Abby is appalled that Douglas sat there overnight, unnoticed. She asks Frank to escort Douglas upstairs to see his mom, but Frank horks up the reveal that Belinda is dead. Abby is stunned. She sags a bit as her eyes register total dismay. She chokes that Frank needs to find Douglas's father and bring the boy a plate of fries. Meanwhile, Gallant has rescued Miranda from the hungry jaws of death, and Luka compliments the young student on a good catch.
It seems Douglas's father lives in L.A., but the tot doesn't know the phone number. He sits peacefully in the waiting room while Abby turns around and rails on Frank. She can't believe that an ex-cop like him wouldn't think to call the school and track down a contact number that way. "Act like a cop!" she scolds. This answers the question of whether the actor, who appeared early in the series as a detective, is playing the same character -- it appears so. And to his credit, Frank doesn't get arsy with Abby. Instead, he's almost -- gulp -- gentle. I find myself wanting to hold him. Abby figures out that Weaver treated the mother, and she loudly hisses in disgust that someone from neurosurgery ought to come down and tell little Dougie that his mother has died. But from the look on Frank's face, it's apparent that someone already let slip that information -- sure enough, Abby turns around to see Douglas peering up at her, confused and upset. "No, she didn't [die]," he whimpers. Abby cringes, picks the toe lint out of her back molars, and escorts Douglas to the waiting room so that she can explain about the birds and the bees, and what windshields and flyswatters do to them.