- Hawkeye moves out of the Swamp while brooding over a patient gone sour, while Frank rubs salt in the wound after suffering Hawkeye's insults to his surgical ability.
- A typical day at M*A*S*H 4077: A Poker marathon culminates in the O.R., where Hawkeye publicly mocks Frank's surgical ineptitude. When Frank asks Hawkeye a serious question at dinner, Hawkeye is unnecessarily nasty. A surgical patient of Hawkeye is getting worse; and Frank rubs Hawkeye's nose in it. Hawkeye obsesses over this patient; he will not play poker or panky and moves out of The Swamp so he can think. Radar reports these facts to Henry so he can do the worrying. Henry proves why he is C.O. as he tosses the gauntlet to Hawkeye: is it his patient or is it his ego bothering him? And as Hawkeye explores the answer to this and other questions, Frank steps up; he says the right thing. Does ego drive the doctor or does the doctor drive the ego? And, at what point does the patient enter into the equation?—LA-Lawyer
- The episode opens in a poker game. When it is interrupted by incoming wounded, Hawkeye and Margaret operate on a patient and Hawkeye insults Frank by saying that he doesn't know what he is doing on the operating table with his patient. This time the insult goes outside the operating theatre and Hawkeye gets personal against Frank at the lunch table. Hawkeye says that Franks is consistently bad at his job as a surgeon. He asked for help 3 times in a single session and when he makes a mistake, he doesn't have the sense to admit it and start over. He is insulting to the nurses, bloody arrogant, demanding, distracting and dumb. and surgically incompetent. He would let Frank operate on him for dandruff. A definitive pain in the butt. Hot lips tells Henry that she will go to Geneal Blake if Hawkeye doesn't stop and apologize to Frank, in public.
The patient that Hawkeye operated on, had a large metal fragment from a grenade. He had a hole in his Iliac artery and the fragment was close to his spinal cord. The patient was in danger of being paralyzed, but Hawkeye's expert hands saved him. However, Hawkeye's patient fails to improve after surgery (fever, abdominal pain, pulse 112, BP 110 over 70.. temperature 101). Hawkeye starts him on IV penicillin as he might be having a wound infection. Hawkeye becomes overly concerned with the case (as the white blood count drops to 18000 and the temp rises to 102), to the point of attacking Frank over comments at lunch (Frank says that the super surgeon has messed up for once.. And that Frank didn't kill anybody that week), sleeping in post-op, snapping at Trapper for playing poker too loudly (after he himself refused the offer to join them at the poker game), and moving out of the Swamp to the supply tent.
While Hawkeye retreats to the supply tent to reflect on the case, he is interrupted by his date (whom he turns away), Trapper (whom he turns away as well), two other soldiers, and Henry. Henry implies that Hawkeye is concerned more about his ego than about his patient. He says Hawkeye cannot be so in knots about a single patient in an outfit like this. he cannot be Dr. Perfect in this GI butcher shop. Hawkeye replies with a glib remark about Henry's intelligence, which ultimately insults Henry and allows Hawkeye some peace and quiet.
While pondering the case outside the supply tent, Hawkeye encounters Margaret and she theorizes that they made a mistake during surgery (there were a lot of fragments and maybe Hawkeye missed one), eliciting extreme doubt from Hawkeye, who in turn insults her (she was just assisting and he was in charge of the surgery). During the night, Hawkeye has an epiphany and reopens the patient to find a small piece of shrapnel damage behind the sigmoid colon, at which point Frank states that "anybody could have missed that." Hawkeye responds with a sincere "Thanks, Frank."
Contribute to this page
Suggest an edit or add missing content