Thursday night’s episode of The Office paid tribute to Nathan Robinson, a 15-year-old high school student who died on March 14 of “flu-related complications” and was a huge fan of the show.
The episode ended with an “In Memoriam” and the clip above, of Nathan playing the show’s theme song on the piano.
Producers of The Office learned about the teen when the Boston Globe ran a story on him after his death.
This is so sweet, and really wonderful of the folks at The Office, but what I want to know is how a 15-year-old boy dies of “flu-related complications.”
The Boston Globe piece is here. It says:
Nathan, a 15-year-old freshman at Newton North High School, continued to play the piano, and later the clarinet, every day until just before his death Friday of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, pneumonia, and influenza at Children’s Hospital Boston.
Can someone please explain this to me? How can you not be able to treat the flu in an otherwise healthy teenager? This just makes me angry.
Anyway, Nathan seemed like a kickass guy, and I’ll keep his family in my prayers.
there had to be more than flu going on, cause we all know how easy it is to treat that.. no one would let a 15 y.o. go b/c fo the flu without a fight..
It’s not the flu, it’s mrsa, a drug resistant staph infection. what jack had on his face and had to leave project runway. my grandmother had one.
MRSA is the likely killer (having a current mortality rate +11%) not influenza.
It depends on if he had a lung infection via influenza or MRSA. Both can infect the lungs (even at the same time, I believe).
Chances are they put him in the hospital for having pneumonia brought on by the flu. This compromised his immune system and allowed the local MRSA at the hospital to take hold.
My _guess_ would be that this led to lung necrosis from the MRSA toxins.
Hard to tell, very uncommon case
Healthy 15 yr old dying from MRSA pneumonia in bostonian hospital?
I would think of sepsis and multiorganic failure
but why?
if he were 70 yrs old,I wouldn’t be surprised though,
maybe he had some immune deficiency we don’t know about
I would think you had heard about MRSA bfore seeing as how it has been all over the real news stations. Top that with pneumonia and influenza, hm, maybe he did have some type of immune deficiency.
He had MRSA. That is what killed him. Thousands die every year from MRSA infections. These bugs are resistant to almost every known antibiotic. Theses infections are becoming more and more widespread, epsecially among the elderly, children and people with immunity issues. My BFF has a MRSA infection right now and has been fighting it since she had knee replacement surgery in January. Right now she doesn’t have a knee and might lose her leg. And she is still not out of the woods as far as dying is concerned. She got this infection during surgery in a hospital.
the office is back?
AND FYI: 30,000+ people in this country alone die of influenza every year…
MRSA is just unreal, if you are leaving for college get your vaccinations! It’s a huge freshman killer.
Something sort of related, I went in for my rabies shots, I mean flu shots, anyway… They asked me to get a whooping cough shot, not for me, but the new strain KILLS newborns and infants! By inoculating adults and children they are hoping to lower the death rate of tiny babies. Now that’s sad. My doctors office was giving anyone who would come in the shots for free.
Go with God, Nathan. It’s a shame this had to happen.
I believe Jinxy means get your meningitis vaccines for college. There is no MRSA vaccine.
MRSA is bad. It can live for at least 36 hours on a sterile surface and indefinitely on surfaces that are not. And he didn’t necessarily have to have an immune deficiency. Influenza and pneumonia are common killers to those with allergies and asthma as well.
Congrats to The Office for honoring such a fan. Their efforts may bring more awareness to the dangers of MRSA, influenza and pneumonia to healthy people.
My 15 year old son died Feb. 14 of methicillin-resistant Staphylococcus aureus, pneumonia, and influenza. Pneumonia caused by mrsa is deadly. I can assure you thjat an otherwise healthy young person can indeed die from this horrible bacteria. This is not as rare as you might think – the CDC issued an alert to the medical profession in late January to check for MRSA pneumonia if the doctors had a patient with influenza who suddenly took a turn for the worse. This illness killed my son in 5 days. It is serious and should be talked about more.
My previously healthy 12 year old son recently died from influenza and staph pneumonia. It is becoming a common thing! My son died after being in the hospital for six weeks, had I not brought him in it would have killed him in four days.