“The surgery was a success!” Dr. Shaun Murphy exclaims as he wakes up Dr. Aaron Glassman after his surgery to remove a brain tumor. “My next shift starts in 31 minutes, and the surgery was a success!” he cheers and walks out of Glassman’s room to get ready for the day. In the meantime, Lea is texting Shaun asking to chat and he is deleting each message. As they take on their shift, Dr. Nicholas Melendez tells the doctors that two of them need to volunteer for a 36 hour shift, and it ends up being Shaun and Dr. Morgan Reznick, together. Reznick and Shaun go on rounds together, fixing a man whose erection won’t go down, and a young boy who put a lightbulb in his mouth and ended up with lockjaw. Shaun has to call in the lock jaw patient to Dr. Lim, who ends up being in traffic court over a speeding ticket. When Lim asks for a quick recess to attend to her work, the judge gives her a hard time.
Melendez, Dr. Alex Park and Dr. Claire Brown are on their own case to help a woman who is desperate to have a baby, but is in incredible pain due to endometriosis. When the doctors go in to remove the lesions on her uterus caused by the endometriosis, they find it’s much worse than they thought. Melendez has Claire go out to give her husband an update, and she is noticeably angered by why she was the one picked. After she leaves, Melendez goes on to ask what’s Claire’s problem today, and the other women inside the OR stare him down. Even though she didn’t want to do it, Claire is gratified when the husband tells her she’s “good at this.”
Claire finds Shaun pacing in the hallway and he tells her Lea keeps calling after he sent her back to Hershey. “Lea’s your friend, you can’t just wall yourself off from people in hopes you never get hurt,” Claire tells him, which prompts Shaun to have an epiphany and figure out how to get the light bulb out of the young boy’s mouth. He puts a surgical bag around the bulb and has the boy bite to break the glass, and it works!
Back in the OR, Claire returns and apologizes to Melendez and he tells her to close up. “Figures you’d let her close up after she apologizes to you,” one of the nurses remarks. Melendez tells her to scrub out, and she refuses. He then says she will have a meeting with he and Andrews about this, and she says she looks forward to it. Looks like this episode is touching on a subject we’re all chatting about these days!
In his hospital bed, Dr. Glassman starts to have hallucinations and hear a child’s voice, which we can probably assume is his dead daughter. He doesn’t look good, at all. Shaun, on the other hand, has worked through lunch and is patching up a patient’s bloody foot when a nurse tells he and Reznick that their erection patient is back. “Is it gonna die?” the patient asks. Rezsnick says she just needs to review the labs, even though Shaun says they’ve already looked at the results. After Reznick strikes down calling Dr. Lim, Shaun goes to Glassman’s room for advice.
In the OR on the endometriosis case, the doctors find another lesion after each removal. As she begins to crash, Melendez and his team open her up to save her. He suggests removing the uterus, which would mean the patient wouldn’t be able to fulfill her dream of having children, but Claire suggests a different way. Melendez says to ask the patient’s husband what he wants to do, and sends Park this time, and says he needs to speak to talk Nurse Flores and Claire.
Reznick tries telling Shaun that Lea’s kiss was a “pity kiss” and Claire isn’t “really” his friend. Shaun walks away and looks into their erection patient’s room and starts to realize the issue may be in his spine.
Lim, who was behind bars for being in contempt of court, is let out, and says she’s going to sue the judge. “What you should do is learn to keep your mouth shut,”the male guard tells her as she walks out. She meets up with the sexy male prosecutor and tells him, “Women of power are worse than men,” and she couldn’t agree more.
At the same time, Melendez tells Flores and Brown to stop “undermining him” in his OR, and Flores claps back to say he was out of line when he referred to Brown possibly being “on edge” because she may be on her period. Andrews looks down from above and tells them they’re all irritable and to take a break before returning to the OR to finish 26 hour surgery that was suppose to take an hour. Park comes back to tell them they have the husband’s approval to do Claire’s surgery idea.
Reznick and Shaun interrupt Lim — who is having sex with the hot prosecutor — to tell her she needs to come in for surgery. In surgery, both Reznick and Shaun hit their point of fatigue j28 hours into the long shift. Shaun asks Lim whether she is just nice to him because she pities him, and explains what Reznick told him. Lim says that some people may treat him that way because they “feel bad” for him, but he’d never know until he talks to them.
In the other OR, Melendez declares they will need to go forward with the full hysterectomy. He says he’ll scrub out to go and tell the husband, but Brown offers herself up, again. “How could any man…?” the husband says, when Brown asks him to make a decision for her. “Please help me, whatever you say is what I’ll do,” the husband says to a stunned Claire. When Claire explains to the doctors what the husband says, Melendez starts to say that he dream is to be a mom so they’ll do what they can to make that happen, but Claire interrupts him to say, “He asked me to make the decision, and I think her life matters more than a dream. Do the full hysterectomy.” In the end Brown took the lead on the close and Melendez went to tell the husband the hysterectomy was a success. While the patient was upset when she was up, she said it was going to be ok, through tears.
Also, Shaun and Reznick’s patient was happy when he woke up, with no erection and full feeling throughout his body.
At the end of the shift, when Andrews met with Nurse Flores, Claire and Melendez, Dr. Melendez spoke up to compliment his team. “I was very pleased with how everyone worked together as a team, and I was especially pleased with how Dr. Brown stuck to her choice and spoke up,” he said. When Claire shook her head and had nothing to say, Andrews asked Nurse Flores if she had anything to say. “I would like to say I was very impressed hearing Dr. Melendez listen to the team. It is something the nurses very much appreciate,” she said.
Lea is sitting outside of the hospital waiting for Shaun as he leaves his 36 hour shift. “I shouldn’t have told you to go away. It wasn’t very nice and you’ve always been nice to me,” Shaun says. “If you want to talk, I will listen.” “You’re right. I have been a good friend. I’ve been an awesome friend. You’ve been a total jackass,” she yells at him, and continues to slam his behavior before storming off. “Guess I was wrong, she does think of you like a real man,” Reznick smirks as she walks by.
Before the end of the episode, Glassman continues to struggle to fall asleep. In what is definitely a hallucination, Glassman’s teenage daughter comes to him and he starts to cry as he holds her hand. The Good Doctor will explore more of this next week on Monday at 10 PM!