Death
In various interviews, Kellie Martin stated that she and the producers felt the character of Lucy was not working, so it was decided that Lucy would be written out of the show permanently. Martin also said that having family members face serious real-life medical issues nixed her interest in working on a medical show. On February 14, 2000, over the course of two episodes, "Be Still My Heart" and "All In The Family", Paul Sobriki (played by David Krumholtz), a man with schizophrenia, checks into the emergency room. Lucy picks up on his mental problems, but Carter noticeably dismisses her and refuses to contact the Psych department on her behalf, leading her to angrily say "Just forget it, Carter!" and stop seeking his advice on the case. While in a delusional state, he acquires a knife that was to be used to cut a Valentine's Day cake and stabs Knight multiple times: twice in the abdomen, once in the chest and once in the neck. Dr. Carter enters the room, seeing a Valentine for Lucy on the floor, he picks it up and looks over it smiling, then from the shadows Paul comes up behind Dr. Carter and stabs him twice in his lower back. Dr. Carter falls into shock and hits the floor, gazing in surprise at Lucy lying in blood on the other side of the gurney. Her face is pale, and her hair is wet with blood. She is in shock and soon passes out. Lucy had received 4 serious stab wounds to her internal organs, lung, and neck. Although Dr. Weaver and Dr. Corday are able to stabilize Lucy in the ER, and Corday and Dr. Romano are then able to repair her tissue damage, she soon develops complications, including a pulmonary embolism. Despite the heroic efforts of Doctors Corday and Romano, Knight dies while in the catheter lab awaiting a Greenfield filter; her time of death, as pronounced by Dr. Corday, is 02:56 hours.
Lucy's memorial service takes place in the episode "Be Patient," although it is not seen on-screen. In the episode, Carter asks Jing-Mei "Deb" Chen how the funeral was; Deb replies that it was quite pleasant, but that it was strange to be attending a funeral for Lucy. That same day, Lucy's mother, Barbara Knight, arrives to clear out her locker. She eventually seeks Carter out and, after an afternoon of talking, asks Carter if being stabbed hurts, as her daughter spoke highly of him. Carter lies and says that it didn't hurt at all in order to put her mind at ease. Carter later talks to a few characters and says Lucy was a better doctor than he gave her credit for. He also says in the Season 6 finale "May Day" that Lucy's death is "partly my fault."
In the episode "A Match Made In Heaven," a letter for Lucy arrives from a med school. She had matched to County, and, had she lived, she would have been given a position as a psych resident.
Read more about this topic: Lucy Knight
Famous quotes containing the word death:
“Life folded Death; Death trellised Life; the grim god wived with youthful Life, and begat him curly-headed glories.”
—Herman Melville (1819–1891)
“But, when nothing subsists from a distant past, after the death of others, after the destruction of objects, only the senses of smell and taste, weaker but more enduring, more intangible, more persistent, more faithful, continue for a long time, like souls, to remember, to wait, to hope, on the ruins of all the rest, to bring without flinching, on their nearly impalpable droplet, the immense edifice of memory.”
—Marcel Proust (1871–1922)
“Disease generally begins that equality which death completes.”
—Samuel Johnson (1709–1784)