What Would You Do?
February 10, 2010Ok, confession time: I watch Private Practice. It’s a cheesy spin-off of Gray’s Anatomy. I can’t convince anyone else I know that it’s worth an hour of their time, but I faithfully tune in each week (or so). Most of the time, the cast is dealing with some rather depressing issues – infertility, abuse, death, etc. I sat down to watch the most recent episode last night and it was especially heart wrenching.
Spoiler alert – if you haven’t seen it and you want to, don’t read the rest of this post. The episode opens with a woman giving birth (not the gory stuff), but she isn’t interested in the baby, only in the baby’s cord blood. It turns out the couple has a pair of 8 year old daughters with leukemia and they need the cord blood to treat them. Unfortunately, the cord blood has a low cell count which means there is only enough to treat one of the girls.
This is of course Hollywood drama – the parents are then faced with the decision – which daughter do they save? The mother puts her foot down. She refuses to choose. If they can’t both live, then they both die. The show paints the mother as crazy, and cruel for not choosing to save at least one of her daughters. And I found myself sympathizing with her. In her shoes, I don’t think I could choose which child lived and which child didn’t. It’s the age-old Sophie’s Choice question. It kind of surprised me that the writer’s of the show weren’t more sympathetic to this woman’s position.
None of us can really know how we’d react in a similar situation unless we are actually faced with it. I know that much as I’d love to be the type who springs into action, my instinct is to freeze in the face of an emergency. I can only imagine that I would freeze, shut down, if faced with that sort of choice. The father in this episode did choose, sort of. He voiced his opinion, and a few minutes later (again with Hollywood drama) the daughter he chose to let go got too sick for the treatment. Watching them explain to the two sisters that one was going to live and one was going to die was most definitely a tear-jerker.
If nothing else, the story from this episode made me squeeze my children a little tighter and longer this morning and send a silent non to the Gods that everything is right in our little world, and that my kids are healthy, happy and safe.
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