Question:
Who is this Marfan's Syndrome patient, and what's the big deal about what Chen and Malucci did to him?
Answer:
The short answer is, read the recap of "The Longer You Stay." The long answer is:
A man called Paul was brought into the ER on Chen's first night as Chief Resident; she also had the authority of an Attending. She wasn't handling the chaos terribly well. Weaver, who was on duty that night, stepped across the street to Doc Magoo's to chat up a private investigator who thought he has located her birth mother. Got it? Moving on...
Malucci impatiently rushed to a diagnosis, assuming Paul took drugs that constricted his arteries, sent him into arrest and formed a blockage, probably a blood clot. He was confident and didn't want to wait for the toxicology results, because time is precious. He wanted Chen or Weaver to authorize a course of treatment called thrombolytics -- blood-thinning agents that destroy clots. Haleh paged Weaver a few times but got no response, so a harried Chen was called in to sign the papers. Malucci assured her Paul's x-rays were clear, so she signed the papers authorizing thrombolytics without actually checking the x-rays herself. Just as Dave administered the meds, the tox screen came back negative for cocaine, putting a kink in his diagnosis. Paul's pulse completely crapped out.
Carter entered the room, and within two seconds saw an abnormality in the chest x-rays that indicated Paul had Marfan's Syndrome -- a disorder of connective tissues that often results in circulatory defects. Meaning that thrombolytics was by far the wrong course of treatment -- kind of like if you're a hemophiliac and have really thin blood, and someone doesn't know that and gives you blood-thinning agents, which ends up screwing you up even more. So Paul's veins basically started to disintegrate and he was at risk of blood leaking out and filling up his chest cavity. Bad, mmmkay?
Chen screamed for someone to find Weaver and get her expert help. Weaver still hadn't replied to her pages. Carter remembered she went Doc Magoo's and ran across the street to get her; by the time Kerry returned, Paul was toast. Kerry raged at Chen and Malucci and denied getting their pages. At the end of the episode, though, she snuck back to Doc Magoo's in search of her pager, and found it in the bathroom; she couldn't answer the urgent pages because she wasn't wearing her pager.