Episode 20: Owner of a Lonely Heart

I’ve had a lot of time in the last six months to reflect on what it means to be lonely. For starters, I know now that there’s a difference between being lonely and grieving. Although I was definitely grieving for part of that time, I know that some of my sadness of the last few months was loneliness. All those winter weekend days when the weather was crappy and I had nowhere to go but to the gym and home, when I took the long way home from the gym because I was listening to music and crying? I think a lot of that was loneliness. I spent a lot of the spring trying to figure that piece of the puzzle out. And, remarkably, I’m better. Way better.

So here we are in an episode about loneliness, and I have to rethink how this all went down. We open with Meredith’s voice-over:

“A great many of the lonely people come from hospitals. More precisely, from the surgical wing of hospitals. As surgeons, we ignore our own needs so we can meet our patients’ needs. We ignore our friends and families so we can save other people’s friends and families. Which means, at the end of the day, all we really have is ourselves. And nothing in this world can make you feel more alone than that.”

I thought about this a lot during my residency. It seemed so weird to me that I spent half of residency exhausted, depleted, and neglecting my personal life while spending so much time and energy trying to help my patients. There are doctors that get addicted to this life and end up living for work, often at the expense of their relationships, families, and friendships. (I remember one specifically-he always hung around the floors and would randomly show up in ICU late at night. One night, when I was on call in the ICU, the phone rang, and I announced. “If it’s for me, I’m not here, because I’m afraid that’s Dr. _____.” All of sudden, I heard a voice behind me. “That’s not me on the phone,” Said Dr. ______, because I’m right here.” Oops.)

There much discussion about Alex’s hookup with the nurse Olivia (which Izzie walked in on): 

Meredith: “You dodged a bullet. You’re better off without him.”

(Of note, more people have told me I’ve “dodged a bullet” in the last few months than ever before in my life. It has always annoyed me. And it annoyed Izzie in this case, too.)

Cristina: “Why are you even surprised? You sleep with a snake, you get bit.”
So true.

Later in the episode, Addison tries to “teach Izzie a lesson,” by making her stay overnight (when she is post-call!) to provide one-on-one care for a quint that is definitely going to die (a fact that was established earlier in the show but not revealed to Izzie.). Not only does Addision not back Izzie up when the baby is actually dying, when Izzie falls asleep, and wakes up to find the baby is dead, Addison reveals that she knew the baby was going to die all along. It’s not totally clear why this whole drama was a good idea- to “make Izzie a better surgeon by teaching her distance,” ostensibly. All I can say is that if someone did this to me, I wouldn’t be a better doctor, and I wouldn't just be furious that I was in the hospital for 48 needless hours without sleep or a shower, I'd be calling accreditation committees to complain about the way my hospital treats trainees.

Yeah, I'd be furious. And reporting my attendings to the authorities.

Rosanna Arquette has a pretty good turn as a mass murderer who has solitary-confinement induced Pica. She swallows 4 razor blades and, later, tries to swallow a lightbulb and nearly chokes to death. She also gets to utter the classic line,

“I only murdered three people and none of them were doctors.”

Rosanna, you were way better as a bisexual hottie. Maybe it's the just the hospital gown that's freaking me out.

Despite this modestly interesting character, I still think her turn as a bisexual hottie in the L word was far more compelling.

One of the other quints who was dying is saved when Meredith suggests cobedding the baby with a sibling. Nice idea, except it is not supported by current medical evidence. Sorry, Meredith, I do not agree with the assessment that your idea was genius. I think your improved outcome was more like luck.

The best I can say about this is that the picture is cute. Medically, it makes no sense.

Everyone ends the episode happier, although it’s not totally clear why. Meredith quotes a line from “No man is an island” and then the roommates get a dog, but other than that, their situations seem pretty much the same as when the episode began.

Great. Now you have a dog none of you have time to care for. And oh, also, your way too skinny legs still freak me out.

Last best line:


Bailey: "Just like interns, they're not ready for the real world."

In contrast to the Grey's characters, my loneliness is better because my life situation has changed remarkably in the last few months. Why am I different? My reasons:

1. Fitness camp: I am far happier, because today I've run the mountain (or gone to the gym, or been to spin class), and in doing so have proven that I love myself. And that alone would be enough.

But I also have:

2. Friends: My friends have been there for me, consistently, completely, and always without me even needing to ask. They have carried me through my loneliness and now I’ve come out the other side, and once again, I am reminding them that I am, oh, so grateful.

And, yes, OK, finally, the one new thing (some of) you have been so anxiously waiting for me to announce:

3. I have a new girlfriend. And she’s totally great.

Episode 19: Much Too Much

Sex. Everyone is having it.

The opening scenes of this episode are full of passionate kisses between various cast members, leading to clothes being thrown on the floor and, eventually, everyone collapsing into heaps of post-coital bliss. This type of scene was done far better in the movie Antonia’s Line, and I highly recommend watching that again (imdb’s one liner on that movie: “A Dutch matron establishes and, for several generations, oversees a close-knit, matriarchal community where feminism and liberalism thrive.”) over watching this episode.  But watching this show is my part-time (yes, I know, recently VERY part-time. You can shut up now.) job, so I’m in it for the whole 42 minutes.

McDreamy and Addison are finally re-consummating their marriage, though the viewer can’t help but notice how wistful and sad he looks after having sex with Addison. Um. Are we supposed to feel sorry for you here, buddy? Because I wish I had your problems. Well, actually, no, I don’t, but it still doesn’t mean that they’re actually problems. Stop looking so sad and grow some balls already.

Burke is pulling a traditionally lesbian move on Cristina: The U-haul. After one night together, he leaves her his key in the morning and later, over lunch, asks her to move in.

CRISTINA: "If a key turns in a lock, and no one asked for the key or even wanted the key, does it make a sound?" My feeling about this note: Why are "C" and "B" in quotation marks? Comments welcome.

Let me offer you some advice, Cristina: Run away. As fast as you can. I speak from experience here: I once had a girlfriend who brought a suitcase to date 2 and then didn’t leave my house for a year. When I finally broke up with her, I had to pack her stuff back into the aforementioned suitcase, put the suitcase in my car, drop her and the suitcase at her house, and leave her with a portable DVD player (which I never got back) so she could sleep in her own bed without being scared. All I’m saying is: a key on date number 1 is a bad sign.

Meredith has been bringing many different male visitors home from Joe’s Bar in an attempt get over her obsession with McDreamy. Good sex does have a way of making a person forget about past heartbreak, but Meredith being the queen of the whiners means that this is going to get complicated. Unfortunately, her most recent somebody from Joe’s bar arrives at the hospital right after the credits, uncomfortably holding a leather jacket (straight out of the 90s) in front of his crotch. Yes, in this unlikely world, even though he is not on trazodone and has not taken any drugs for erectile dysfunction, he is suffering from persistent priapism.

Redefining the "walk of shame." Nice jacket, BTW.

More unlikely than his final diagnosis of a spinal tumor (in fact, I could only find spinal tumor-associated priapism in a horse, so it’s clearly quite rare) is the fact that the actor who plays “Steve” is first Indian I’ve seen on this show. Come on! This is a show about surgical residents and none of them originate on the subcontinent? Anyone who has been in a hospital in the last 25 years knows that we (yes, I’m Indian, although I prefer to be referred to as one of “the metabolically challenged people.”) are everywhere in hospitals these days.

Izzie and Alex are hooking up but Alex is having some performance issues (God, sometimes I think this show is all about penises. Remember season 1?) and then, later in the episode, he hooks up in a call room with Olivia (the nurse to whom he gave the gift of syphilis. It’s so Douche with a Heart of Gold of him.) And, of course, Izzie catches them.

This is all going on while Izzie tends to a ridiculous plotline about a woman who is having quints (and who already has triplets. I do not care and will not talk about this plotline. Ugh.) while Alex treats hyponatremia in a man with a pituitary tumor (played by Curtis Armstrong , best known for his stint as “Booger” in Revenge of the Nerds).

Yes, Booger is alive and well and making the rounds between this show, and, I suspect, every Law and Order and CSI offshoot on TV.

When Alex announced to McDreamy that he was using “hypertonic saline,” to treat the hyponatremic patient, I was actively yelling at the television, “No! Use normal saline! It’s relatively hypertonic to the patient’s serum!” but nobody listened to me, and three scenes later (usually it’s more like three days in real life, but this is TV), the patient was seizing and foaming at the mouth, and clearly supposed to be suffering from a condition known as central pontine myelinosis, which is a sudden destruction of the protective coating covering the nerves in part of the brainstem. They don’t show what happens to him, but because this condition can lead to being “locked in,” I suggest you watch “The Diving Bell and the Butterfly” to find out what the rest of Booger's life is like (ah. ee. oo. uu. repeat.). Oops, Alex. Maybe you failing the boards was the best thing that could have happened to your future patients.

Quotes of the week:

Alex : “O’Malley is a fetus. All whiny and afraid of the light.”

Uh, gross?

Izzie: “People have sex in this hospital all the time.”

I know. I've been complaining about this ridiculousness since episode 1.

Meredith: “Why does every guy I meet come with his own unique set of nightmarish humiliations?”

George: “Maybe it’s a matter of volume?”

Meredith: “You think I’m sleeping with too many guys?”

George: “I think you’re taking some risks. I think you’re going to find yourself in a hole in some guy’s basement being told ‘it puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again.’”

The weird thing about this exchange is that the song playing in the background is "Lotion" by Greenskeepers. The words to this creepy song are “it puts the lotion in the basket.” Creepy.

The Urban Dictionary has reported that “it puts the lotion in the basket” is now a phrase that can be “Used to describe events or objects that are extraordinary in some way. Derived from the film The Silence of the Lambs, in which the line, “It puts the lotion on its skin or else it gets the hose again” is uttered to a woman in an extraordinarily bad situation. Connotation is often but not necessarily negative, and always implied:

“What do you mean your wife is cheating on you? That totally puts the lotion in the basket.”

Cristina: Congratulations. You’re flaccid.

Ridiculous woman pregnant with quints: “I don’t believe in odds.” 

This was better said by Hans Solo in The Empire Strike Back when he yells at C3PO: “Never tell me the odds.” As a health services researcher, I struggle with this request.

Line most likely to be heard in a future episode of Greys: “That’s the tumor talking.”