Episode 8: Save Me.

Yes, please save me. Ex dropped her dog off with me today so she could go on vacation for two weeks. She’s off to (DO WHO KNOWS WHAT) with (IF I WERE TORTURING MYSELF I WOULD TRY TO GUESS WHO). Just to add to my self-esteem hit parade, last night, in my women’s recreational soccer league, my team, (a motley crew consisting of 35-40 year-olds, half of them moms) played a championship-winning varsity college team. Needless to say, they demolished us. We looked like amateurs. Losers. After the game, my teammate was upset, and turned to me and said, “I’m just mad that I was never as good as they are right now.”

Well, true. Neither was I. Once upon a time, I was pretty good, but I was never a super hotshot college student who attends an elite liberal arts college and plays varsity soccer. I was more a state-school, club-soccer-kind of girl. The team we played last night was full of winners in the most annoying sense of the word, and we’re, well, 40ish with desk jobs and a few extra pounds.  

Still, as much as the mortgage and the job and the few extra pounds are weighing me down, I’m not sure I’d trade them to be in the shoes of a college student again. I never cried at weddings until I was over 30 and divorced-now I cry because yes, it’s very sweet, but also because I secretly want to pull the newlyweds aside and say, “You have no idea the pain you’re in for with this little venture of yours, so good luck.”

I guess what I’m trying to say to the winners who clobbered us last night: You’re ridin’ high now kids, but just you wait until life is ridin’ you. Or, alternatively, wait until I’m your attending and you’re my third year medical students (that’s four years from now, juniors, not that I’m counting), because I’ll probably make you cry. See, I am embracing my new identity as a hypercritical attending. Instead of feeling guilty that I made that medical student cry, I’m going to be slightly sadistically happy that I could steal the last bits of her youth and idealism right out from under her. And no, I won’t write you a recommendation for residency unless you’ve actually done a good job. And I have high standards.

But back to Grey’s. This episode seems to be consistent with my current life situation: it opens with “You know how when you were a little kid and you believed in fairy tales? That fantasy of what your life would be? White dress, prince charming…you had complete and utter faith. Eventually you grow up, open your eyes and the fairy tale disappears.” Yes. That’s exactly what I’m saying here. Weird.

Then it says, “Almost everyone still has that smallest bit of hope, of faith that one day, they’ll open their eyes, and it will all come true.” Uh, not so much. I just suffered through a dinner where all my friends tried to convince me to go on Match.com. Nightmare. Don’t they get it? Match.com works for normal people. However, I am not normal people. The freaks I met during my brief stint on Match scarred me for life. Sometimes, me still cry alone at night over it. In addition to the freak-magnet issue, the number of people I could possibly date in the world is so small that there is no point in looking, and there’s particularly no point in looking for love at epicenter of painful rejection in the modern world, otherwise known as Match.com. I swore I would never put myself through that again. And I won’t.

The plot of this episode again verges on the ridiculous. There's an orthodox Jew who needs a porcine valve (of course) and there's also a psychic who may really be a psychic or may be having seizures that make him think he is a psychic. And Cristina is getting an abortion. Maybe. Only the psychic knows for sure. In the meantime, she has to convince a pregnant woman with breast cancer to get an abortion and start chemo (of course she does). And George is having troubling with intubations. In an early scene, he intubates a patient’s esophagus.

It’s not such a big deal to intubate an esophagus. “Don’t you know an esophagus from a trachea?” Demands Frat Boy. Hey, smart aleck, it’s actually hard to tell the difference. Esophageal intubation happens all the time. It’s easy to fix and in the meantime, you bag the patient.

Best quotes of the episode, the Cristina Yang/Sandra Oh! version:

1. Cristina to Neuro resident: “Did you go to medical school?”

 “I did. Unlike the correspondence school you attended.”

“Yeah? That’d be Stanford? Stanford correspondence?”

 

2. "Why does every thing in a hospital smell like a hospital?" 

(So true. Never take the lotion home. It's free, but it's not worth smelling like a hospital.)

3. Cancer patient to Cristina: "You know you have quite the bedside manner, right?"

4. Psychic to Cristina "God, you're hot...in a Mrs. Livingston kind of way." 

The episode ends with McDreamy showing Grey his trailer. They grab hands and walk in together. My take on this: They have no idea the pain they’re in for with this little venture of theirs.