Chicago Med season 5, episode 14 recap: It May Not Be Forever
Marcel and Natalie
Dr. Crockett Marcel awkwardly shares an elevator with April and has no idea how to make small talk whatsoever. “What happened is in the past,” she tells him, and he feigns memory loss. No one believes you, dude.
When he gets off the elevator, Dr. Natalie Manning is just bringing a car accident victim named Rick into the Emergency Department. His wife Kim isn’t far behind, so Marcel stays with the original patient while Natalie goes to help his spouse. So only Natalie sees massive bruising down Kim’s lower back—and immediately the excuses start. It must be from the car accident. She fell down the stairs last week. No one believes that, either.
Marcel is soon operating on Rick, and decides that he has to amputate the man’s leg to save his life. That requires Kim’s consent, and so Natalie is in the room when she gets the bad news (albeit a far wordier explanation than Marcel needed to give). “I’m not sure what Rick would want,” Kim admits, and so Marcel backs off amputation and agrees to put Rick in the ICU as a sort of stalling tactic.
Natalie decides to tell Marcel about the suspected abuse, because she believes it makes Kim unfit to decide about her husband’s care. Marcel takes Natalie into Sharon Goodwin’s (S. Epatha Merkerson)’s office to argue the point in front of her, suggesting that “we’re going to take away the legal rights of an abuse victim,” even though he disagrees with Kim’s thoughts. Time for Goodwin to call another ethics panel!
The ethics panel agrees with Natalie, which means that Chicago Med is amputating Rick’s leg. Natalie and Goodwin offer Kim help while her husband is in surgery. When next Chicago Med viewers see her, she’s telling Natalie that “he really does love me.”
Natalie steps out of the room to greet the social worker, only to discover that Kim turned off Rick’s ventilator while she was gone. Rick’s dead, and Kim has admitted to the act that killed him. She’s promptly arrested, while Goodwin tells Natalie that there may not have been “any way to reach her.”
Meanwhile, Marcel’s whole commentary is “that if we’d just let it be, he would have died on his own.” Chicago Med wraps up with him explaining to Natalie that it’s a “lousy outcome” to see an abuse victim being taken to jail, and likely now having to do prison time, when the same ending would have happened if she’d respected Kim’s rights as Rick’s medical proxy. He’s not wrong, but he’s still kind of a jerk about it.