Heather has never been what we’d call stable on General Hospital. Longtime viewers know that well. But finding out that she was a hook wielding serial killer who put, among others, Britt into an early grave, still felt like one heck of a jump.

Now, though, we may have found out why it happened — and gotten her off the hook for, at least, her most heinous crimes! Because on today’s episode, we learned that Heather was suffering from metallosis, which led to cobalt poisoning from her hip replacement.

To be clear, both Heather and the show were a bit fuzzy on when this hip replacement happened and how long the cobalt’s been poisoning her mind, as well as her blood. It’s not entirely clear whether they’re going to use this to explain her mental imbalance in general or just dial back her extreme murderous tendencies. But as far as excuses go, it’s actually not bad!

Despite its odd sounding name, metallosis is, indeed, a real condition, often caused by metal joint replacements rubbing against each other and releasing metals into the bloodstream. And cobalt poisoning from hip replacements is also very real.

According to DrugWatch (we’re relying on expertise outside of our own here to make sense of some really technical medical research), symptoms of cobalt toxicity can include “depression and other mental health conditions” as well as “cognitive impairment.”

A few years back, Grey’s Anatomy even explored this when Dr. Richard Webber was diagnosed with cobalt poisoning from his hip replacement, causing dementia and Parkinson’s-like symptoms and making him act very out of character.

With that said, there’s no word on whether it can make you a serial killer, but we’ll allow it, if that’s the explanation. Heather’s never been well balanced, so it wouldn’t be a stretch to say that piling onto her mental problems could have pushed her to some dark extremes.

On top of that, we got a surprisingly touching talk between Heather and Laura, that kind of beautifully addressed the sometimes disjointed nature of soap opera characters. While Heather was coming to terms with her diagnosis, Laura stepped in.

“If it makes you feel any better,” she admitted, “I feel like I’ve lived a few different lives. And sometimes I can’t always connect the dots between them.”

“It’s so random,” Heather marveled. “It’s just so disjointed. Sometimes, I feel I’m in freefall.”

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And that gets right to the heart of how different writers can put different spins on characters — resulting in some major jumps sometime. And with the new General Hospital writers’ material beginning to air, it sounds like that might be what’s happening right now. Except, instead of another disjointed jump, they’re trying to get things back to how they were.

Heather signed off on surgery to have the replacement removed. And while there are risks, once it’s out and the cobalt poisoning stops, people can return to their healthy normal selves. We guess we’ll find out soon enough what that means for Heather, but if nothing else, it may just stop her freefall once and for all.