Episode 29: Band Aid Covers the Bullet Hole

CHIEF: "Yang, what is that smell?"
CRISTINA: "That's feces, sir. Baby feces."

CHIEF: “Are you having trouble with that diaper, Yang?”

CRISTINA: “No, sir. I have an MD from Stanford and a PhD from Berkley. I can handle this diaper.”

Yes, this was a stinker of an episode. This stinker of an episode only increased my annoyance with my worse stinker of a day.

Everything I touched today turned to, well, feces. Among other things, I: spilled a pan of boiling oil all over my girlfriend’s kitchen (she’s OK, but her leather boots and kitchen rug are ruined. And don’t think I don’t know what you’re thinking: Get your minds out of the gutter. It was a cooking accident.); dipped the sleeve of my sweater into a pint of ice cream; dropped my phone and shattered the screen; got into an argument with every member of my family; and, after an unfortunate “women in medicine” dinner last night where a reproductive endocrinologist repeatedly asked me questions like, “You’re how old?”, I spent the day fretting about my conflict of career, relationship, and reproductive future.

I also have some fancy degrees, Dr. Yang, but I’m not sure I can handle this diaper.

MEREDITH: [narrating] "As doctors, patients are always telling us how they'd do our jobs. Just stitch me up, slap a band-aid on it and send me home. It’s easy to suggest a quick solution, when you don’t know much about the problem or you don’t understand the underlying cause or just how deep the wound is. The first step toward a real cure is to know exactly what the disease is to begin with. But that’s not what people want to hear... We're supposed to forget the past that led us here, ignore the future complications that might arise and go for the quick fix."

Let me first say that I’m not sure that this in any way true-maybe it’s true for surgeons, but for the most part, nobody except the most simple of patients ask for a quick fix from me. Most know it's more complicated than that.

Among the Grey’s crew, attempts at “quick fixes” include:

1. George cuts his hair to combat his emotional turmoil:

ALEX: What’s with O’Malley’s hair? He looks like a hobbit.

 

Do you remember the Shire, Mr. Frodo?

2. Because she can't figure out another childcare option, Bailey brings her baby to work and forces Cristina to babysit:

Yeah, I'll back you up if you go to the ACGME over this.

She gives advice over the phone from the OR:

MIRANDA: "Let me hear him cry!"
CRISTINA: "What?"
MIRANDA: "Let me hear him cry! That's cry number four. He's hungry."

Bringing a one-month old to the hospital violates federal law, common sense, and standards for professionalism

OK, I must comment here that this baby is less than two months old and any good doctor knows that babies younger than two months have no immune systems. If they get a fever, they get a full “sepsis workup,” including a lumbar puncture. Bringing him to the hospital was not very responsible, Dr. Bailey. Of course, the hospital is required by law to give you three full months of maternity leave, which I’m pretty sure you didn’t get or didn’t take.

3. A couple who choose to ignore the woman’s possibly fatal aneurysm so they can run off to Paris.The result? The patient presents with “fork in the neck” sign (don't even ask) and gets a subsequent off-the-wall neurosurgical escapade by McDreamy.

So, how long ago did you notice that you had a fork sticking out of your neck?

4. Izzie seems to be dating her patient, Denny the heart failure guy. 

He can date, but he can't breathe. And soon he won't have a pulse.

Aside from the fact that her attendings should take her off this case immediately and prevent her from engaging in further inappropriate behavior, Izzie offers Denny’s “quick fix:” the placement of a left ventricular assist device, which is a device that helps the heart circulate blood. Such devices are considered a “bridge to transplant.” Other famous people with LVADs? Well, there aren’t many, but there is Dick Cheney. According to ABC, the device means that he “no longer has a pulse” because his heart now works more like a fish tank's continuous pump rather than an intermittent pump:

Jon Stewart says this indicates that “He’s more machine, now, than man.”

On the Grey’s front, Alex is the only one to correctly assess Izzie’s situation:

ALEX: You’re his doctor and he’s your half-dead, soon to be all-dead patient.”

IZZIE: “I can’t believe you said that”

ALEX: “Someone’s got to.”

5. George is in a plotline with that orthopedic surgeon and a hockey player who cuts off his own finger. Whatever.

6. Addie is told she resembles a “young Catherine Deneuve.”

I’m not sure what this has to do with anything, and I don’t think it’s even true.

Catherine Deneuve. She was hot in that lesbian vampire movie.

And then the moral:

MEREDITH: [narrating] "As doctors, as friends, as human beings, we all try to do the best we can. But the world is full of unexpected twists and turns. Just when you’ve gotten the lay of the land, the ground underneath you shifts. It knocks you off your feet. If you're lucky, you end up with nothing more than a flesh wound, something a band-aid will cover. But some wounds are deeper than they first appear, and require more than just a quick fix. With some wounds, you have to rip of the band-aid, let them breathe and give them time to heal."


OK, I'm ready to feel better now. Shouldn't the reading of the moral confer some degree of stress relief? 


Waiting.

Episode 28: What have I done to deserve this?

You may have heard that the northeast corridor was recently walloped by a snowstorm in late October. After that storm, I know why trees lose their leaves during the winter. It turns out that 8 inches of heavy wet snow falling on trees that are still full of leaves results in branches that bend, crack, and then fall on power lines and houses and cars. 

This is not my car, thank goodness, but it is my neighbor's car. Even worse, it was the only car parked on the street. True bad parking luck. What did they do to deserve this? The Grey's writers think they know..read on.

There were more than a million people without power during the storm, and I was one of them. On my 3^rd day without power, in my dark 40-degree house lacking TV, DVR, cable, or Internet, with just a few Grey’s DVDs and a couple of half-charged computers, I faced a question that has been on my mind since this task began: if Grey’s Anatomy were the last show on earth, the last possible form of entertainment available to me, would I watch it by choice?

The answer is: yes, I would. But I would be cursing my luck the entire time. And I would be repeatedly asking myself, “What have I done to deserve this?” These facts make this Grey’s episode all the more fitting.

GF and I actually had a tough few days. At first, it was a little bit fun. We made s’mores over the fire and nestled down for a chilly afternoon, but after a day without power, when I had driven to every gas station in a 30 mile radius and had found only one open, with a two hour wait to get to the pump, I started feeling like I was just a scantily-clad Tina Turner away from “Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome.” 

I was also basically wearing this outfit while fighting every other desperate driver in this town for the last gas pump, which makes the Mad Max comparison all the more real.

Later that night, when we were freezing in the house and my poor GF with bronchitis couldn’t stop coughing, I started to feel more like I was in a Charles Dickens novel. It was only the next day, when they emergently called me into work and the hospital was so full that there were cots in every conference room full did I start to feel a tiny bit like a character in Grey’s Anatomy. Well, I felt like a Grey’s character, less the medical tomfoolery (I didn't see a single spontaneous orgasm, for example) and the attending-intern hookups, of course.

Grey’s aside for one moment, you be wondering why the hospital so full. We had patients with carbon monoxide poisoning (from their improperly installed generators), burns (fireplaces), and falls (walking around in the dark), and a bunch of people who were cold and had nowhere else to go.

So I’m glad to be back in the land of electricity, heat, hot water, and open gas stations. Although I watched a lot of Grey’s I’m sad to admit I didn’t take notes, so I’ll have to re-watch the episodes in order to take pictures and blog about them. Sorry, people, but this blog doesn’t write itself. And I couldn’t very well take notes and pictures while using my computer to watch the show. Geez.

Back to episode 28. George and Meredith, fresh from their hookup, are skulking around miserably the entire episode.

CRISTINA: [referring to George] "What is with him?"
ALEX: "Okay, 50 bucks O'Malley caught her doing McDreamy."
IZZIE: "McDreamy?"
ALEX: "Did I just call the dude McDreamy?"
CRISTINA: "Oh, you know you did."
ALEX: [to Izzie] "You are ruining my life."

I mean,  all this awkwardness is a little ridiculous given that this is Meredith, who has hooked up with half of Seattle. You’d think she’d know how to handle a trick after she’s done with him:

ALEX: [to Meredith] "That's what you do. When you feel sorry for yourself, you get drunk and sleep with inappropriate men. It's okay. I find it charming."

But instead of explaining herself, Meredith trudges around telling everyone she’s a bad person, leading George to take over the job of “monologue.”

George: “Okay, so, sometimes even the best of us make rash decisions. Bad decisions. Decisions we pretty much know we're going to regret the moment, the minute, especially the morning after. I mean, maybe not regret, regret because at least, you know, we put ourselves out there. But...still. Something inside us decides to do a crazy thing. A thing we know will probably turn around and bite us in the ass. Yet, we do it anyway. What I'm saying is...we reap what we sow. what comes around goes around. It's karma and, any way you slice it...karma sucks.”

So the episode is about karma. I’m a karma-doubter. Look at this Buddhist explanation of karma:

“What is the cause, what is the reason, O Lord," questioned a young truth seeker of the Buddha, "that we find amongst mankind the short-lived and long-lived, the healthy and the diseased, the ugly and beautiful, those lacking influence and the powerful, the poor and the rich, the low-born and the high-born, and the ignorant and the wise?"

The Buddha’s reply was:

"All living beings have actions (Karma) as their own, their inheritance, their congenital cause, their kinsman, their refuge. It is Karma that differentiates beings into low and high states."

So basically, if you’re poor, ugly, or otherwise unfortunate, it’s your own fault. Those starving kids in Africa? Don’t send them your Midwestern leftovers. Their lot is their own fault. Patients with cancer? Ditto. Given these harsh and ridiculous implications of this definition, I've realized that this is not the usual popular culture definition of “karma.” The popular definition of karma is better captured by another quote: "We are the heirs of our own actions."

This karma interpretation plays out in the episode a few ways: Addison contracts poison oak after popping a squat during a dog walk. She claims that the poison oak is the result of her tryst with Mark back in New York. Presumably, she doesn’t think he had anything directly to do with the poison oak in her backyard in Seattle. Rather, poison oak is karmic retribution for cheating on McDreamy. I found this plotline to be a little confusing at first, because I initially interpreted her uncomfortable squirming to be not poison-oak-itchiness but the “Pelvic Inflammatory Disease (PID) shuffle" (a patient develops a shuffling gait to reduce jostling to the pelvis-because of cervical motion and general pelvic tenderness associated with PID, a sexually transmitted disease). Contracting PID wouldn’t be karma so much as cause and effect (have unprotected sex with someone who has an STD and you might get a disease) and, given the timing, it would have made more sense that she caught it from McDreamy rather than Mark.

It's easy to mistake Addison's itchy waddle for the "pelvic infammatory disease shuffle." Or maybe just a serious wedgie.

In other news, there is a gay couple who have a child with a head bleed. I don’t know what they (or, especially the kid) did to deserve a near-death experience, but judging from their outfits, I suspect the charges stem from a fashion violation. Once again, Grey's gets the gays wrong. Do you know any gay men (including gay dads) who would wear a brown suit, a mustard shirt and a sh*t brown striped tie? Spontaneous orgasms I'll buy. But this? It's too far fetched. (Although I sort of believe in fashion karma.)

It was a crime of fashion.

In other news, Alex seduces Izzie with a cupcake, but despite his elaborate schemes, she's still falling for the transplant guy.

As I watched the scene, I said to GF, "You know, a cupcake is the perfect way to seduce me." I think she heard me but was so busy rolling her eyes she didn't take the time to write it down.

The real question, though, is what we as viewers did to deserve the worst things we get in this episode: actors fake crying.

First, Addison fake-cries over her poison oak:

If I ever claimed that she was attractive, I take it back. She has officially jumped the shark with this one.

Then we find out that Meredith freaked out and "cried" during her hookup with George, and he panicked and left the room, meaning that they never actually slept together.

Meredith takes whining to a whole new level. I think right before this, George said, "Don't cry. I was just messing with you when I told you there were calories in your toothpaste."

What did George do to deserve this? Nothing I can see. And it gets worse. First, the entire program finds out that he and Meredith hooked up and that it was a disaster. Then he falls down the stairs and dislocates his shoulder. Finally, he ends up moving in with Cristina and Burke! Cristina asks the question that all surgeons ask before every admission:

PRESTON: "You're a good person."
CRISTINA: "No, I'm not."
PRESTON: "You're helping a friend."
CRISTINA: "Are his problems surgical?"
PRESTON: "No."
CRISTINA: "Then we can't help him."

And then George reads the moral: "Karma evens the score. And even when we're about to do something we know will tempt karma to bite us in the ass...well, it goes without say. We do it anyway." 

OK, I admit it. I found a 5 dollar bill in the hospital parking lot last week and I kept it because I couldn't figure out who to turn it into. Then a snowstorm hit my house and we lost power for days. It's ridiculous to think the two could be related. No way. Although...it does kind of make wonder what my neighbor did to have that happen to his car.