Who's Zoomin' Who?

Well, this is a landmark day, because finishing this episode means I am officially through Season 1! Only 6 more seasons to go until I recover from this breakup completely. Unfortunately for me, the rest of the seasons have more like 25 episodes. Season 1 has 9 episodes. Still, it’s quite an accomplishment to be through one insufferable nightmare of season, punctuated by intern-attending hookups, outlandish clinical scenarios, and, in this episode, secrets.

The secret rundown: Grey has kept it a secret from McDreamy that her mother has dementia and is in a nursing home. McDreamy is getting calls on his phone that he never answers. Cristina is pregnant and considering an abortion, not that she’s told Burke. George has an itchy rash in a private area, which Frat Boy diagnoses as “syphilis” even though the first sign of syphilis is a non-itchy, single, firm, painless chancre, not an itchy rash. (I would call this the first real medical mistake on the show-they’ve stretched the truth before, but this is blatantly incorrect). And the biggest secret of the show (well, besides the fact that the syphilis outbreak turns out to be hospital-wide, and anyone who wants to be treated gets to stand in the “syphilis line.” If this scenario were true, this would be New England Journal material.)? McDreamy is married. I should have known, given all the phone calls he doesn’t answer and the fact that most surgical attendings are married, but it never crossed my mind, somehow.

There are also two cases of doctors treating each other without records, billing, or accountability. Frat boy treats George for syphilis and McDreamy somehow performs brain surgery on the chief without billing anyone for the OR time. This is, by far, the most unbelievable thing that has happened on this show: if the Chief were a real hospital administrator, he would be far more concerned about the lost billing for 8 hours of brain surgery than he would be about his colleagues finding out that he has a brain tumor (there's a public "syphilis line," but there's shame in having a brain tumor? I’m so confused.). 

 

Syphilis outbreak at Seattle Grace. That's a reportable illness you're treating there, Frat Boy.

In the end, the chief’s brain tumor is magically gone and he has no apparent neurological deficits, and, in fact, moments after his surgery he is well enough to notice that Meredith and McDreamy are involved, a fact he blames on Meredith even though McDreamy is the attending. Everybody else is so busy stressing out about their secrets, having sex, and getting treated for STDs that nobody bothers to write the New England Journal article describing one of the first hospital-based syphilis outbreaks in modern history (if it even is syphilis, since they’re all itchy, which, I must emphasize, doesn’t make any sense. I bet they all actually have crabs, described best by the guy who once came to me asking “You got anything for crotch critters?”)

       

Watching all these characters reveal their secrets has made me want to reveal that I have some secrets, too. First, I resisted my friends’ demands that I go on Match.com. I resisted for exactly 24 hours. I then created a profile and went online. As predicted, it was a total nightmare. In the end, I laughed myself to sleep thinking: “Match.com is 10,000 spoons when all you need is a knife." I've been waiting for 20 years to use that line, mainly because it's not ironic and it doesn't make a lot of sense, but in this case, it just fits. I need that knife to slit my own throat, because I'd honestly prefer that to internet dating. Instead, I have 10,000 people I don't want to date right at my fingertips.

Second, I have decided to spend my vacation at a “fitness camp,” one of those places where you work out 6 hours a day. On some level, unless I am planning to eventually write a book along the lines of “Eat Pray Love” (Given this is fitness camp, I guess it would be called “Nibble, Beg for Mercy from Ruthless Trainers, and Hope to like the people you meet”), this is embarrassing. On another level, I should be proud of myself for doing something that is so out of my comfort zone. I have taken to half-lying about it, calling it a “spa trip.” Yeah, it’s a spa. A spa where they make you exercise 6 hours a day.

 Best lines of the Season 1 Finale!

 “I never talk about my penis with other men.”

“What’s in my closet is none of your business.”

“Why are you in this line?” 

“It’s a syphilis line.”

“When would I have time to go out and get syphilis?”

“He had a blood condition known as HEMATOMOCHROSIS”

(yes, Sandra ‘medical malaprop’ Oh! mispronounced hemachromatosis.)

On to Season 2.....