New Amsterdam Season 5: How true to life are these 5 weird cases?

Medical drama series New Amsterdam is based on the book Twelve Patients: Life and Death at Bellevue Hospital by Dr Eric Manheimer, who’s still a writer-producer on the show. Before Hollywood came calling, Eric was the Medical Director of New York’s Bellevue Hospital (which doubles as the set for New Amsterdam’s hospital, along with Kings County Hospital) for 15 years. He’s the inspiration for Dr Max Goodwin’s (Ryan Eggold) reforming zeal.  

Eric brought 150 notebooks that he kept during his time as a doctor into the writer’s room. And we’re always on the lookout for the show’s stranger cases, wondering whether they’re straight from his files. New Amsterdam’s final season premiere includes a Bollywood musical number in the hospital that sets the bar for weirdness pretty high, but here are 5 patients that made us go, “really?” 

Watch the trailer for New Amsterdam S5

1. Truth: Teddy bear theatre (episode 13) 

The patient of the day is Ukrainian refugee Yulia Salenko (Alina Volobuyeva), whose white blood cells (histiocytes and lymphocytes) are attacking all of her other blood cells in a rare condition that Max recognises as hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis (HLH). Max also picks up that Yulia has a deadly bacterial infection called Brucellosis, which she contracted when she and her son were hiding on a farm while fleeing the war in Ukraine. It’s Brucellosis-induced HLH!  

Where the case really gets weird is when Max calls in every surgeon he can lay his hands on (53 is the quoted count at one point), and they all practise on a teddy bear to coordinate how they’ll move in the crowd during all the simultaneous surgeries they’ll need to perform on Yulia to repair her damaged organs. It looks crazy but in 2014 D. Bothwell Mbuwayesango and his team of 50 Zimbabwean medical personnel rehearsed coordinating their movements for a crowded surgery to separate conjoined twins…by using a teddy bear as a stand-in for the patients. The surgery was a success. 

2. Truth: Visions and vitamins (episode 10) 

Dr Iggy (Tyler Labine) confronts a man who’s standing outside New Amsterdam, yelling, “Get away from them, they will kill you!”. Harlan Jenks (Matthew Rauch, Clay in Banshee) is a rich programmer who claims to have been given electroconvulsive therapy at New Amsterdam as a child, or, in his words, “They do experiments on young children. They use lightning, and they rip out their brains.” When Iggy’s looking around the man’s penthouse trying to figure out why he’s recently lost his grip – despite having lived successfully with schizophrenia for most of his adult life – he realises that there’s precious little inside Harlan’s fridge aside from bottled protein shakes. As a result, Harlan has developed a niacin (vitamin B3) deficiency, leading to the old-timey disease Pellagra. The symptoms include dementia.  

How real could this be? Aside from the strong link between niacin deficiency and psychosis (not exclusively related to schizophrenia), in 2019, Indian researchers led by Dr Sathish Periyasamy, who’d been studying schizophrenia for over 20 years, published a paper in which they highlighted a genetic link between a mutation associated both with schizophrenia, and with the body’s ability to absorb and process niacin. As for the protein shakes, in 2014-2015 there was a spate of news reports about busy tech workers in Silicon Valley saving time by replacing meals with nutritional and protein shakes.  

3. Truth: The killer cabinet (episode 5) 

Police barge into a surgical room in New Amsterdam, interrupting an operation to arrest nurse Andrea (Anna Orlova) in connection with the death of a patient. Andrea has run foul of New Amsterdam’s drug dispensing machine and gave a patient the wrong medication due to an error. The arrest sends the nurses into an uproar as they fear any one of them could be next, and Max has to help Dr Wilder (Sandra Mae Frank) to persuade them to get back to work.  

As outrageous as it seems, this has happened in real life. In 2022, nurse RaDonda Vaught was convicted of “reckless homicide and felony abuse of an impaired adult”. She was sentenced to three years probation and lost her nursing licence in connection with a deadly error she made in 2017. RaDonda overrode an automated dispensing cabinet because it wouldn’t allow her to access the drug needed for a patient’s MRI scan (thanks to the machine not cross-referencing the different names the medication was known by). It was something that she claimed the staff had to do every day because the cabinet often caused delays during emergencies. Unfortunately she then accidentally selected the wrong drug and ignored multiple warning signs that it was dangerous. Her patient died.  

4. Truth: Golden blood (episode 3) 

A fire at a wedding brings a flood of patients to New Amsterdam, giving the doctors four intriguing patients including a man with a high heel broken off in his back (think of how much force that would take!), and a woman who has swallowed and inhaled shards of glass while running through the champagne tower. But it’s the groom who really gets the doctors’ attention. He has the rare Lutheran B negative blood type so his body will reject the universal donor blood type, O Negative. His case leads to a desperate hunt through the American Rare Blood Donor Programme (ARBDP), and then the International Rare Donor Panel (IRDP) for a donor with “Golden Blood” – Rhnull, a rare blood type that truly is universal.  

Currently there are only nine active Rhnull donors worldwide. In August 2022, Rhnull hit the news when two sisters in China tested positive for the blood type, bringing the global total of known people with Rhnull blood to around 50. As well as giving intriguing insight into the complexities behind the international exchange of rare blood, the episode also highlights the pressure and physical stress placed on donors with rare blood types – along with the exploitation of Black and poor medical donors – as family members reprimand New Amsterdam’s doctors for trampling the boundaries that are meant to protect donor identity.  

5. Lie: Black lungs (episode 12) 

Can you regift a lung? In this episode, Dr Floyd Reynolds’ (Jocko Sims) patient, Lilo (Joe Grifasi), skips the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS) transplant queue to buy a lung in Honduras, but winds up back at New Amsterdam when his body rejects the organ. It’s a perfectly good lung (allegedly), and the doctors are fretting about it going to waste. Nurse Gabrielle (Toya Turner) goes looking for the original donor to ask whether they want it back, and they find out that the donor sold their lung to support their destitute family.  

Can you really re-implant an organ in the original donor, though? In this case, there are far too many hurdles to the truth. Being a living whole-lung donor (as opposed to donating the lower lobe of a lung) is already a stretch too far. And since Lilo’s body is actively rejecting the lung to the point that Dr Floyd wants it taken out of his body immediately, that would indicate that his body has damaged the lung to the point where it wouldn’t be suitable for transplant.  

Diagnosis: four truths and a lie.

Watch New Amsterdam S1-5 now on Showmax.

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