Should Survivor players with minor medievacs be able to return?
One Big Brother 19 player will leave for almost 24 hours to receive surgery. What if Survivor players leave to get minor infection exams and return?
Last week, I gave up on my episode recaps of Big Brother 19 because staying up to date with the live feeds and comparing the game to Survivor seemed like a fool’s errand. How, exactly, could this producer-meddled “Shout Hour” compare to a game where people are removed from televised society for 39 days with little food, little water and personal perseverance?
Spoilers for this week’s unaired Big Brother 19 live feed content.
Something that happened last week sets up a weird predicament that has me thinking about Survivor a whole lot. One player, Christmas, broke something in her foot last week, requiring crutches to get around the house. She even competed in this week’s Head of Household competition by crawling on the floor.
On Wednesday, she will leave the Big Brother house for a ~6-hour surgery, returning just in time for Thursday’s live eviction. It will be extremely painful (for you, as a viewer, and her personally), but then the pain will temper off. No upcoming challenges will be changed for her, but she will receive a roughly 24-hour mental refresh from the lying, deceit and manipulation that comes from playing Big Brother.
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After the immediate thought of “her leaving the house should be considered a medical evacuation,” it got me thinking about how this would possibly work on a show like Survivor. We already know of one case where Missy Payne didn’t participate in the final few Individual Immunity Challenges due to a foot injury, and she stayed all the way until the Final Tribal Council.
If Christmas can leave Big Brother 19 to get non-life-threatening surgery done, I feel like that, in the cases where a medical intervention is minor and exploratory, a strict 24-hour limit would be enforced to give the player the chance to be removed, medically checked out by doctors, given minimal water/sleeping supplies and sent back into the game. No player would be exempt from Tribal Council in this scenario.
Think about all of the times players have been medically evacuated from Survivor for relatively minor things they can’t fix on the beach. In Survivor Caramoan, Shamar was pulled from the game due to getting sand in his eye. Jeff Probst considered Colton’s medical evacuation a quit because medical thought he had appendicitis (even though, upon quick examination later, he didn’t).
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Several infections evacuations could have been treated with antibiotics and minor medical operations if Survivor contestants had been allowed to be checked out temporarily. In cases like Neal from Kaoh Rong, James and Penner from Micronesia and Joe from Tocantins, who knows if given antibiotics and follow-up checks from the medical team could have led to different outcomes?
It’s just one possibility to explore, as there are arguments to the pros/cons of leaving the tribe on Survivor even for a medical checkup that follows most of the cruelties they’d suffer on the island. It would certainly be difficult to work around when someone needs to be evacuated late in the game, too. The easier solution is definitely a medical evacuation to cover all bases, especially if it is a contest that lasts a strict 39 days.
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Having players leave the game and come back is just one of the many ways that show just how harrowing Survivor is compared to Big Brother. The idea that someone can be taken out of the game against their will due to a relatively minor incident that can be considered life-altering in the long run is rough, but that’s ultimately what the game is all about.