This Tiny 'This Is Us' Flashback Detail May Reveal Something Huge About Kate's Childhood – UPDATE

The latest episode of This Is Us was surprisingly sparse on the Pearsons, but there was one brief moment that fans may have missed that could spell out a major reveal in coming episodes. In the midst of an episode all about Deja, a quick scene showed a flashback to young Kate Pearson being admitted to a hospital. So obviously, that raises the question: why was young Kate in the hospital on This Is Us? The small detail might turn into a bigger storyline soon enough.

UPDATE: As fans of This Is Us have pointed out, Kate got her appendix removed in the first season of the show. This was most likely the reason that we saw Kate wheeled into the hospital in the flashback.

EARLIER: Tuesday night's new episode of This Is Us, entitled "This Big, Amazing, Beautiful Life," took a swift turn away from the Pearson family to give viewers an entire, heart-breaking backstory for Deja, Randall and Beth's former foster daughter. It was a very surprising move to shift focus completely away from the main characters, especially given the fact that it was the last episode for the big This Is Us Season 2 finale next week, but the Deja-centric episode actually did manage to sneak in a few new glimpses into the Pearson family's past. Throughout Deja's backstory, the episode also showed a few brief scenes of the backstory of other characters, depicting similar events to what Deja went through. For the most part these scene weren't very enlightening, just sweet and emotional, but a couple did stand out as some new information for This Is Us fans.

These short flashbacks included another look at Jack Pearson's younger brother Nicky, showing Jack reading Goodnight, Moon to him one night when they were kids. Jack's relationship with Nicky is something that many fans think that This Is Us may explore through flashback storylines moving forward, since it has still largely been unseen. We only found out that Jack had a brother at all earlier in this season, because he chooses not to talk about Nicky very often. As the Goodnight, Moon scene depicted, Jack was a father figure to Nicky since their actual father was a frequently absent alcoholic. Jack and Nicky fought in the Vietnam War together, where Nicky died, and Jack kept his brother's pendant to remember him by, eventually passing the necklace on to his son Kevin.

The Jack and Nicky flashback was cute, but the most surprising flashback was a quick scene showing Kate being brought into a hospital as a kid. After Deja cuts her hand open on a can opener, she rushes to urgent care, and we see a very brief flashback to young Kate on a stretcher being wheeled down a hallway as young Kevin walks beside her.

Now, we have gotten our fair share of the Pearson family's various medical traumas already. This Is Us already thoroughly explored Kevin's football career-ending broken leg, present-day Kate's miscarriage, and of course, Jack's smoke inhalation-caused death in a hospital. But it looks like there is another medical mystery that the show is ready to start digging into. Viewers have not been let on to believe that Kate had any major medical problem as a child, so this brief scene introduces whole new information into the Pearson family history.

One big question is whether Kate is in the hospital as the result of some physical accident like falling and breaking a bone, or if she was diagnosed with a more serious disease that we have yet to learn about. If it is the latter, then finding out about it would have huge ramifications on Kate's overall story throughout the years.

Next week is the season finale of This Is Us, so if this show was ever going to do a big, character-altering reveal like this, then that would be the time.