In the latest episode of New Amsterdam, the doctors fight to help their patients when a wedding goes wrong, bringing the majority of the attendees in. They’re conflicted by their work after learning a twist about the wedding.
Not So Happy Couple
A woman is being treated for several injuries while her husband tells Floyd about some back pain that he’s having. Floyd struggles to figure out what happened when he sees what looks like a gunshot wound in the patient’s back. He talks to Lauren about it, who just treated her own patient with a sprained ankle. She holds up the broken high heel that she took from the woman, and they realize that the heel broke off in the man’s back.
The couple agonizes over what happened, with the husband feeling bad because he left his wife when a fire turned the wedding into a mess, and the wife feels bad for unintentionally trampling her husband in the rush to get out. While they confirm that it’s the heel in the husband’s back, the wife starts coughing up blood. It turns out she inhaled some glass when she ran into the tower of champagne trying to leave the wedding. They rush her to surgery and remove it all.
Progress in Communication
Max attempts to talk to Elizabeth using sign language, which leads to a light-hearted laugh between the pair when Ben struggles to understand what she’s saying. He tries to get her to type what she’s saying, but she refuses and insists that he’ll get it. They discuss later a choice they made in the episode to not tell a patient about something and if it was the right move.
An Explanation for Horace
Floyd opens up to his sister, mom, and stepfather about thinking that Horace is bipolar. The group doesn’t take the news well and explains that even if he’s got it, he still hurt them and had some control over what he did. Later, Floyd still goes to his dad and says that he thinks he knows why Horace is the way he is. Horace has mixed reactions to the news.
The Start of Healing
Lauren, who is staying with her sister, continues to struggle with the environment she sees her sister living in. She tells Vanessa that she’s going to be stuck there for a month because of repairs on her apartment. Vanessa originally disagrees but caves when she offers to pay rent. Vanessa lashes out though and mentions that after this, Lauren will just disappear from her life again.
At work, Lauren admits to Walsh that her sister doesn’t know that she’s sober. When she’s home, she plans to apologize to Vanessa for the hurt she’s caused her by leaving her with their mother, but Vanessa beats her to it and apologizes first.
The Mystery of the Flower Girl
With the rush of the wedding guests being brought in, the flower girl’s mother is brought to a bay in the ED and looked at. When they’re done treating her, she and Lauren realize that the flower girl, Lily, is physically fine and awake but unresponsive. Lauren asks Iggy to check on her, and he diagnoses her with catatonia. Her mom is hesitant to let him help especially when he wants to set her up in the behavior unit but eventually allows him.
In the behavior unit, they have Lily set up in a bed and are giving her medicine to help. Iggy and her mom watch through the window and talk about her treatment. As they watch, she begins to have a seizure. They get her back and later Iggy tries talking to her. He shows her dolls of wedding figurines and explains how his own wedding was. After, he asks her to show him how the wedding she went to was using the figures. She’s been becoming more aware as they continue the treatment, which leads to Lily telling Iggy that she wasn’t the flower girl, but the bride. She asks how her husband is doing, to Iggy’s horror.
Finding a Rare Blood Type
The groom from the wedding gone wrong is brought in and has severe bleeding. Max and Elizabeth are working on him, and Max realizes that his blood type is a rare one, so they can’t give him O-negative, despite it being considered the universal blood type. Elizabeth tells him that there’s none of the blood type needed on hand at New Amsterdam. They work on hunting some down but learn that nowhere in the United States has it. They manage to find some out of the country, but it gets stuck at Customs, and they won’t be able to get it for two or three days.
Max finds a lead in the Bahamas where there’s someone with a rare universal blood type that will work and devises the plan to fly the donor to New Amsterdam to avoid the Customs hold-up. The donor doesn’t want to go at first, because their granddaughter is being born but decides that they’d rather tell their granddaughter one day that they chose to help someone. Right before they show up and tell Max that they’ll help though, Max learns about the bride being a child. They decide to not disclose that information to the donor.
The Aftermath
The doctors gather at the end of the day to talk about everything they learned. They talk about how they’ve treated bad people before, but it didn’t feel nearly as bad as this. While they acknowledge that they’re feeling this way because all of the guests stood by and let the wedding happen, Iggy shows up and tells them that no one is going to get in trouble for what happened either, because there’s no federal law against child weddings. It turns out Lily’s older brother, who is only 15 himself, started the fire to try to prevent the wedding.
After everything, Iggy goes home despite it being Martin’s night and tearfully asks him if he can see the kids.
New Amsterdam is back on Tuesday, October 11 at 10 p.m. ET on NBC. Until then, check out our other coverage of the show here!