Nurse Jackie

The television show that I decided to watch was Nurse Jackie. In one of the episodes there is a kid who falls from the playground. When he arrives to the ER it is discovered that he has a collapsed lung. The reason for the injury is due to the neighborhood that the family lives in, The Alphabets. It is revealed that The Alphabets is a poor neighborhood, and that the playground has concrete rather than the nicer neighborhoods that have rubber floors under the playground. Though not discussed in depth, it is inferred that if the family had lived somewhere else the injury would not have been sustained. 

Another injury that occurs is a kid who falls off his skateboard. He is rushed into the ER, and undergoes diagnostics which eventually reveal that he has an abdominal aortic aneurysm and increased intracranial pressure. At first the mother is given sympathy by the nursing staff because she wasn’t able to do anything about her son falling. Later on in the episode the mother reveals what was going on before the fall. She explains that her son had been booked for the cover of Pottery Barn Kids, and she had asked the photographer to take photos of her son without his helmet for his portfolio. There was social judgement associated with how the kid sustained the injury. Nurse Jackie yells at the boy’s mother for putting her son in danger and allowing him to go down a half pipe without a helmet. She tells the mother that her responsibility should be to protect her child, and that because of the injury it would take him over a year to relearn how to walk.