Saving Hope

On the way to their wedding, Dr. Alex Reid and Dr. Charlie Harris’ cab is T-boned. The driver of the other car’s lung collapses, and Charlie springs into action - showing why he is the Chief of Surgery at Hope Zion hospital - inflating the lung on site. He saves the woman, but something is wrong with Charlie. He loses consciousness and is rushed to Hope Zee with Alex at his side. As his friends at the hospital treat him, Charlie realizes that he is looking at his own body. Stuck between life and death, he watches as he is rolled into the ICU. All Alex can do is wait and hope that Charlie wakes up, while maintaining her duties as Chief Surgical Resident. Alex’s worst day ever is further complicated by the arrival of Hope Zee’s new orthopedic surgeon – and Alex’s ex-boyfriend – Joel Goran. Joel, in his way, attempts to be supportive and meanwhile takes on all of Charlie’s patients; including a young war hero scheduled for an arm amputation, who Joel thinks has ulterior motives for refusing limb sparing surgery. Alex, in the midst of treating a young pregnant woman, tries to keep it together as, unbeknownst to her, her comatose fiancé stands by her side, desperate to let her know that he’s still there.

Alex has taken to sleeping in Charlie’s ICU room, and her devotion to her comatose fiancé causes interim Chief of Surgery, Dr. Dana Kinney, to challenge Alex on her ability to be a doctor while keeping a bedside vigil at the same time. Alex’s day doesn’t get any better when Charlie’s ex-wife, Dr. Dawn Bell, arrives to check in on him. It’s the last thing Alex needs to hear, but Dawn questions if Alex is truly doing everything she can to help Charlie wake from his coma. Meanwhile, Alex is tasked with diagnosing a young boy whose symptoms and behavioural changes just aren’t adding up. The boy finds himself with Charlie in the spirit realm while Alex attempts to bring him back from the brink of death. Can Charlie diagnose the kid himself, on the spirit-side? Joel and Maggie have no trouble diagnosing their patient; but when she refuses a blood transfusion based on religious beliefs, Maggie - who is developing a crush on Joel - cannot believe they aren’t going to do anything to try and change her mind. With emotions running high and lives hanging in the balance, Alex could use a dose of hope – which she gets when she receives a sign that Charlie is still there in his body.

Alex is riding high after Charlie’s hand moved. She’s convinced: he is coming back. As she begins to mull taking time off to spend with her recovering fiancé, she is tasked with diagnosing a patient who already has several surgeries under his belt. His mysterious symptoms do not seem to connect, but is Alex’s head in the game or the clouds? Then a roof collapse brings two brothers into the ER in critical condition – one of them beyond saving. The brother joins Charlie on the other side of the divide where the two of them try to determine what is keeping him from moving on. The surviving brother’s leg has been crushed and if there’s any hope of him regaining function, Joel must perform a rare surgery that flies in the face of Kinney’s policy to avoid high-risk and litigation at all costs.

After finding out that Charlie’s condition hasn’t improved, Alex is growing concerned about his chances of recovery. Her worries are exacerbated when she detects a crackling in Charlie’s chest. Does he have pneumonia? To keep her mind active, an already exhausted Alex takes an overnight shift in the ER. Hoping for a peaceful “treat ‘em and street ‘em” kind of night, the ER instead turns into a hotbed of activity when a hockey superstar comes in with injured ribs from a street fight, and soon after a young man stabbed in a nightclub is rushed in by ambulance. The stabbing victim falls into a coma and meets Charlie. While Charlie tries to prepare the kid for a long stay on the spirit side, he impresses Charlie by willing himself to wake up and return to his body. When he ultimately falls unconscious again, he tells Charlie about his plans for revenge. Meanwhile, Alex suspects the hockey player has a concussion, but when she mentions the dreaded “C word” he heads for the exit – only to be stopped by gunshots going off in the ER; friends of the stabbing victim getting payback. With the hospital in lockdown, Alex can pursue her diagnosis.

When Alex falls asleep during a big case presentation, a suddenly sympathetic Kinney orders Alex to go home and get some rest. While the surgeons of Hope Zee prepare for a high profile hand replantation, Joel realizes that Kinney is giving Alex’s rival surgeon, Tom Reycraft, a tryout for Alex’s position. Joel visits Alex to break the news, and together they march into the surgery, ready to prove to Kinney that Alex is still Hope Zee’s top resident. Back in the ICU, Charlie stares at his comatose body when an elderly coma patient is rolled in. Appearing before Charlie is his spirit, who looks the same as he did the day he fell into his coma, 27 years earlier. He attempts to show Charlie what a treat it is to be trapped on the spirit side – while also trying to convince him that the living will eventually forget him. Elsewhere in the hospital, Maggie is called in to drain the abscess of a homeless man who had been beaten up by a pack of teenagers. While treating him, Maggie begins to suspect his symptoms are being overlooked, and she is faced with trying to convince the other senior doctors that he might be dying.

It has been six weeks since Charlie’s accident, and Alex suddenly realizes: she’s late. Before she can bring herself to take a pregnancy test, Alex is paged to the ER where a man has been brought in by ambulance with rebar sticking out of his chest. Complicating matters is the man’s strange case of memory loss – and stranger yet, he is smiling when he should be screaming in pain. Among his belongings, Alex finds a ticket stub for a hypnotist show. Is it possible he could be hypnotized? When nothing seems to break the trance, Alex’s last resort is to call the hypnotist who put him under: “The Great Randall.” But when the hypnosis is finally lifted, the patient’s pain intensifies – but not from the chest wound. Elsewhere in the hospital, after having “the talk” with Joel, Maggie consults a young woman with a neck injury who claims her mother pushed her down the stairs – but her bizarre behaviour prompts Maggie to call Gavin for a psych consult. Meanwhile, as Charlie deals with the news that his fiancée may be pregnant, he crosses paths with the hypnotist and cannot believe it: The Great Randall can see him.

Sandhya, a beautiful young bride to be, comes into Hope Zee for a routine procedure to remove a benign tumor. When complications arise during her surgery, Alex rushes to save her life. Sandhya stabilizes, but in an event that is a little too familiar to Alex, she slips into a coma. Kinney gives Alex the task of breaking the news to her family. As a loved one of a coma patient, is Alex giving Sandhya’s family too much hope? While in the coma, Sandhya meets Charlie and the two really hit it off. In fact, it’s the closest Charlie has felt to someone since his accident. Unlike Charlie, Sandhya is in no rush to get back to her fiancé, and she wonders: is this coma thing really so bad? In the ER, Joel encounters a patient with horns – silicone implants that he inserted himself. Joel fears that the horns have caused an infection that is eroding his skull and that they need to be removed, but the patient refuses treatment and accuses Joel of trying to take away his identity.

The gloves are off as Alex and Dawn lawyer up and head to a hearing that will determine who Charlie’s legal decision maker will be – a ruling that could determine whether or not life saving treatment will continue. The tribunal hears the passionate testimony of Charlie’s fiancée and ex-wife; both claim an intimate knowledge of Charlie’s end of life wishes, and neither will compromise. While they await a decision, Alex scrubs into a heart transplant surgery of a long-time patient – and, at the last minute, is joined by Dawn, who is covering for Hope Zee’s under-the-weather cardiologist. The two women find themselves operating as a team as they work through the complications with the transplant. In the spirit world, Charlie encounters the owner of the donor heart – a prisoner who died in a violent jail yard dispute. Charlie’s too preoccupied with the hearing to give the prisoner the time of day, but the prisoner needs his guidance when Alex’s patient’s body begins to reject the heart. In the ER, Joel treats the police sergeant who brought in the heart and is complaining of back pain. While the sergeant is a seasoned cop, Joel’s seen his fair share of tragic things too – and he knows that something else is wrong.

Charlie’s ex-wife, Dawn, has pulled the plug on his ventilator. All that’s left now is to wait for his breathing to stop. Devastated, Alex vows to stay by Charlie’s side. Meanwhile, Charlie – resisting his death – bumps into Mack MacIlreath, a recently deceased colleague, who has come to help Charlie die. Alex decides to lawyer up and appeal to the Consent & Capacity Board. While the process gets started, Alex is pulled away to meet with a patient: a young woman named Bea, who Alex performed surgery on while working as a first year surgical resident under Dr. Charles Harris. Bea’s check-up is all clear, but Mack and Charlie fear that she was misdiagnosed. And if Alex doesn’t catch it before Bea walks out of the hospital, she could die. Elsewhere, Joel’s hand is broken and he cannot operate until it is fully healed. Stuck with doing consults, he takes the case of a choir singer who makes a “miraculous” recovery from her paralysis.

Returning to the OR for the first time since breaking his hand, Joel lifts the scalpel, leans in and…completely freezes. He leaves the OR, claiming his hand is compromised, but Kinney knows Joel’s problem isn’t physical. Kinney decides that Joel needs to get away from the hospital, and invites him to come with her on a CME (continuing medical education) expedition to her hometown of Elsinore. While they are teaching small town surgeons big city surgical tricks, a truck overturns on top of an old friend of Kinney’s. Rushing to the scene, Joel and Kinney perform a drastic in-the-field procedure to save her life. But will Joel’s mental block stand in the way? Back at Hope Zee, Charlie is dealing with a mental block of his own. When a therapist dies as a result of ingesting poisonous mushrooms, she challenges Charlie to consider that maybe he wants to stay in a coma. Meanwhile, Alex examines a man with swelling in his chest after an accident at the gym, and discovers he has an underlying condition not expected in men.

When a passenger on a Denver-bound flight becomes seriously ill, the plane is forced to land and the passenger is rushed to Hope Zion. After an emergency surgery, the patient dies. What happens next shocks the staff of Hope Zee: the doctor who accompanied him off the plane starts showing similar symptoms. Alex discovers that these two passengers have brought a deadly and contagious virus into the hospital. The hospital goes into lockdown – throwing the doctors, staff and patients into a nerve-wracking waiting game. All surgeries are cancelled, and no one can enter or leave the hospital. Everyone who may have been exposed to the virus – including Victor who is showing symptoms – is put in quarantine. Locked together in the O.R., Alex and Joel are forced to confront their issues. Meanwhile, when Shahir starts Charlie on an experimental therapy – Transcranial Magnetic Stimulation – Charlie is thrown into a series of dream-like hallucinations, which lead him back to memories of his childhood.

When Shahir tells Alex that Charlie is still a six on the Glasgow Coma Scale, she is not ready to give up the fight. She asks Shahir to perform Deep Brain Stimulation on Charlie – an extremely experimental procedure that could cause brain damage. As the electrodes reach Charlie’s thalamus, Shahir begins to crank the voltage – and Charlie finds himself launched into visions of his past. Elsewhere in the hospital, Kinney catches up with Joel to tell him that a lawsuit stemming from his first surgical case has cost Hope Zion one hundred thousand dollars in legal fees – and now, she’s keeping a close eye on him. When an injured jockey comes into the hospital specifically for Hope Zion’s risk-taking surgeon, Joel has to make a choice that could put his career at Hope Zee in jeopardy. Gavin, meanwhile, faces a difficult decision of his own when he feels that his mentor, Dr. Druckerman, dismisses an Alzheimer’s patient too quickly. Sensing that the patient and his wife have bigger problems than they’re letting on, Gavin offers them his personal phone number. But when he gets called over to their house after a domestic dispute, Gavin finds that he may have let himself get too close to a patient.

Following the events of the night before, it’s a new game at Hope Zion. The fate of Alex and Charlie’s relationship may have now been decided and Alex, with the same spirit that once made her Chief Surgical Resident, takes charge of the situation – pressing onward. But while charting the course of her own life, Alex is faced with the grim task of telling a bride-to-be that she is going to die. Joel is also tasked with making difficult decisions when a young man is brought in with a heroin overdose. While examining track marks on the patient’s arms, Joel and Maggie make a shocking discovery: the patient has necrotizing fasciitis – flesh-eating disease. They rush him into the O.R. where Joel prepares to amputate above the infection, but the disease is advancing faster than he’s ever seen. Incision after incision, Joel chases the bacteria up the arm but he can’t find a clean margin. Under extreme pressure, Joel must improvise if he is going to save this young man’s life.