jwg

I've watched Presidio Med a couple of times. Unlike most of the hospital/doctor shows it isn't all about blood, guts, and doctor's messed up personal lives. These doctors spend lots of time actually talking to their patients and don't rush out in the middle of telling someone that they are about to die. The show has Anna Deveare Smith as one of the doctors (she also plays Nancy the National Security Advisor on West Wing) and Julianne Nicholson who played the young non-girl friend on Tully (the movie that showed at a few theatres for a few weeks and that I reported on earlier in my LJ because I liked it. I really like Nicholson. She seems to play kind thoughtful people who like to relate to other people (her IMDB picture is not very appealing).
I don't know what the story with this show's schedule is. It was new this year and then it disappeared and now it is back running twice a week. I suppose they are using up episodes that they made and it has actually been cancelled.

In last night's episode there was a ~15-year old boy whose second appearance that night was that he had fallen off the roof. After a while it turned out that he was gay and had come out to his parents a few weeks ago. They, especially his mother, couldn't deal with it and as a result he was extremely depressed. Later in the episode he managed to hang himself while in the hospital, was cut down but was brain dead. Eventually, with many conversations between the mother and the compassionate and ethical (Nicholson) doctor the mother admits that she never told him she still loved him and that she had so strongly felt that his life was ruined that she couldn't deal with the reality.
This is another one of those stories that is maudlin and simplistic. It is evidence that if more GLBT people came out then mothers like this would more easily see that being GLBT isn't this burden as so many people think. I think that many parents base their judgments on their own children on the thought that the consequences are so bad and the more example of gay people that they see/know the less likely for such a bad reaction - in this case it was fatal.