Chicago Med Review: Unintended Consequences

The road to illness and lawsuits is paved with self-preserving intentions. For Dr. Reese and and Dr. Robyn Charles, the past few months have been traumatic. They were put into circumstances which compromised their mental health, making them fearful of the outside world. This was horrifically ironic since Reese is a psychiatrist and Robyn is the daughter of one. You can’t give scared, confused patients your full dedication if you cannot trust yourself. Thus two Chicago Med doctors took drastic action to save themselves from what they perceived as harmful outside influences, but did they do what was best in the long-run?

It’s been building for weeks, and I stand by my previous statement. Dr. Reese should have been taken off of her rotation weeks ago. If her superior had the good sense to take vacation time after nearly dying, she should have been forced to take some as well. She could not even stand being in the same room with a psychiatric patient. It defeats the definition of her M.D. That patient, like many in psychiatry, was more afraid of himself than her. All it takes is one frustrated patient getting in her face for her to bring out the pepper spray. It’s bad news for Reese. That action results in her suspension. Ironically, it’s good news for Choi’s patient. Sometimes patients know their own bodies better than doctors. Too often people brush off mild symptoms that can be signs of a real problem for fear that their concerns will be ignored. When Dr. Reese injures that patient, the hospital orders a full battery of tests for liability issues. They end up finding the cause of the man’s suffering. Though he has a chronic condition, at least his concerns are validated.

Dr. Manning takes a mother-daughter duo case which initially presents as exhaustion, but turns out to be much more sinister. In this world, there are too many terrible things a mother is capable of doing to her daughter. Forcibly having her fallopian tubes tied without her knowledge or consent should land in the Top Ten list. When you hear the circumstances, it’s easy to dismiss the mother’s culpability. Thinking about the environment and the time at which that decision was made (under orders from a male judge no less), some may want to cut the mother some slack. That was then. It’s been decades since, and the daughter has the legal and moral right to know.

Doctors are bound to provide the safest, fairest treatment to their patients. That is tough to do when the resources start dwindling. When hospitals start to worry about money, you will know. Those in administration begin to panic and snap for no reason. That is where Maggie is, now that she is short-staffed on nurses. It’s all she can do not to snap at her colleagues. She fails miserably when it comes to the paramedics. Instead of getting frustrated, sometimes you have to get creative. The only way to offset the cost of the low-income and uninsured patients the E.D. takes in is to bring in more patients with insurance. The paramedics choose where to take non-emergent cases, so Maggie decides to entice them with a Pizza Room. It’s a little unorthodox, but it works.

Connor is desperately trying to be there for Robyn, but it has now gotten to a point where he is more her caretaker than her partner. It was Robyn’s greatest fear after she was diagnosed. She is not completely cured of the encephalitis, and now she has begun stealing things. Connor doesn’t become aware of it until Robyn steals from his father’s store. The humiliation is too much for Robyn to take. She can take it from strangers, but not from Connor, no matter how supportive he is. As much as he loves her, he can’t fix her. He can fix a pregnant woman whose IVF treatments have caused other adverse side effects. Her condition becomes so dire that she requires open-heart surgery. That Connor is able to get her through that procedure, and that the embryo survived, was pretty incredible. Robyn’s mind won’t heal that quickly. For both their sake’s, she leaves Chicago to be with her mother.

Can Reese and Robyn get their lives back in order? We will see Reese’s journey, but for now we bid adieu to Robyn Charles. For more on what else her portrayer Mekia Cox has been up to, check our our exclusive interview with her here.