The Resident knows how to pull at our heartstrings. This week it does by showing us inside a clinical trial.
Dr. Devon Pravesh (Manish Dayal) started his clinical trial with a high school science teacher. It was so sweet watching the teacher explain to his students what a clinical trial was before he was a patient in one. He talked a lot about the magic in it, about how it helped find cures for deadly diseases. He didn’t speak much on the other side of it other than to say either he’ll find a cure or it will be something else. He had a lot of that something else during his treatment.
Not that I expected the trial to go smoothly, but I wasn’t expecting what happened. With each dose, the patient got sicker. They had to incubate him because he couldn’t breathe. At what point do you decide to stop during this process? He’s going to die if he doesn’t continue, but he could die because of the trial too. Do you continue because you want a chance at survival or do you continue because what’s learned by your outcome could lead to the cure in the future? It’s a scary process, and I commend anyone who has gone through it, whether to save themselves or help science.
The other side of this is the spouse watching on helpless. Any spouse would advocate for it to stop and be yelling at the doctors. It was these scenes that made me cry this week. The bravery of the husband and the scared wife wanting to do what’s best for her husband and not wanting to lose him.
Luckily, Devon and Dr. Conrad Hawkins (Matt Czuchry) were on the case. Devon talking through what to do led them to give the patient steroids to treat the side effects of the drug. And it worked! The patient recovered and was able to make it through the five doses. It’s still unclear if it will get rid of his cancer, but that’s a start. It better get rid of his cancer after all that. That was painful for the patient and emotional torment for everyone around him.
But it did give us a lot of good Devon and Conrad scenes. We don’t get to see them together enough anymore. They work so well together. They play off each other’s emotions well. And with emotional scenes like this, you have to trust the other actor, and you can tell they have that trust.
Devon is showing us more and more why he’s suited for clinical trial work. He’s so passionate, and he really wants his patients to live. Devon will do almost anything to make that happen, it seems. And I like that he left it up to his patient to decide how far he was willing to go. It’s the patient putting themselves through that. It’s fair that they are the ones that get to decide what is right for them.
What did you think of the first step in Devon’s clinical trial? Tweet me @PrimetimeDrama or @MandyTTCarr or comment below.
