Episode 15: Into you like a train.

I've had quite a week-Lawrence Dai gave me a shout out this week on the Lawrence/Julie & Julia Project! It's been so gratifying to get the increased traffic and new reader comments. Of course, my first action should have been to immediately post about the next episode in a blatant act of pandering to my new fans, but this week has been horrible in other ways. I'm back on service, and it's busy. On Friday, I made an intern cry. Honestly, before 2011, I had never in my career made a trainee cry, but now I've somehow managed it twice in a month. Worst of all, I have this stomach bug that's just dragging on and on. It's all about crampy abdominal pain. And worse.


Today, I finally hit a wall. I was holding the transfer pager and had been repeatedly paged by outside hospitals. If you've never seen the video for outside hospital, watch it. It is not made by anyone I know and it's not about the place that I work, but regardless, it represents what doctors think of the way everybody else manages (but not the way we manage at our hospital) patients. And so taking transfers means that I'm asking again and again, "Why did you do that? And why does this patient need to be transferred here?") As I was sitting there, arguing with doctors in other places, and then, in turn, arguing with our doctors about accepting these patients, I was periodically gripped with stomach cramps and sweats. I became more and more short-tempered as the pain waxed and waned, and at some point really lost it. I hung up on at least one person. Worst of all, the transfer line is recorded and monitored because our hospital is trying to improve customer service. Not my finest moment, and it was caught on tape.


Still, as Meredith says at the beginning of this episode, "Sorry, gotta go tend to someone else's train wreck." So I went and finished seeing all my patients and came home to watch an episode of Grey's and suffer through my stomach cramps in peace. Finally.


Meredith's line sets up the theme of the episode. The post-call interns live in a pre-work hours world, and are therefore all called back into work an overnight shift because a huge train wreck (Grey's: It's so early on in your life span to use the train wreck scenario. ER didn't have a train wreck until season 7!) has brought hundreds of wounded and dying people to Seattle Grace. In one story line, two people, a man and a woman who did not previously know each other, are impaled by the same pole and therefore spend the entire episode simultaneously impaled and embracing each other. Because the pole goes directly though the woman’s spine and aorta, McDreamy and Burke decide that her chance of surviving is minimal once the bar is removed. The man's chance is not great, either, but McDreamy and Burke believe that by slowly removing the bar and repairing as they go, they might be able to save his life.

My issue with the scenario is this: Why can’t they move one person just slightly and cut the bar directly in between them, leaving each person with their piece of the pole (very King Solomon of me, I know)? Instead, they decide to move the woman off of the pole, effectively killing her. The man resists allowing this to happen, but she comforts him, saying, “It’s not fair either way.” In the end, McDreamy has to break the news of  the woman's death to her boyfriend, and he tells him, "She wanted you to know that if love were enough, she would still be here with you." This is a secret message to Meredith, and, possibly, to single lesbians everywhere.

In another story line, two pregnant women who have been best friends since 3^rd grade (but are not a couple) used the same sperm donor to become pregnant simultaneously, with a plan to raise the children as siblings. They then happened to be unfortunate enough to end up in this train wreck late in their pregnancies, and one of them is severely burned. In the rush to sign wills to make sure that the other friend can raise the children if one of them dies, their relationship is revealed to Izzy and Addison:

“We’re not lovers. We’re best friends. We just wanted our kids to have two parents.”

     So there's hope that my plan is more beautiful than pathetic. Note: I do not resemble, in the slightest, either one of these people.

The remarkably crazy thing about this is that since the breakup I’ve been trying to decide what to do next with my life, and one of the things I’ve thought seriously about is becoming a single parent. I have two parents who are aging rapidly, one sister, and no extended family. Sometimes I wonder if it’s fair to bring a child into this small family. If something were to happen to me, that child would be practically alone. So, a few weeks ago I called my best friend, who is a single mother who became pregnant via sperm donor, and I asked her if I could use her same donor so our children would be half siblings. We are not dating and we have never dated, but there would be something comforting about knowing that my child has a half sibling and a permanent connection to a friend I love very much. There are complications with this, of course, and maybe it’s crazy, but now that Grey's Anatomy gave this plan the nod, I'm thinking I might be onto something.

In McDreamy news, he's going back to Addison, which we knew had to happen at some point for reasons I've discussed elsewhere. Meredith, of course, takes this very personally and shows her frustration by going batsh*t for saving the impaled woman long after everyone else has given up, screaming, “What about her? We can’t just abandon her!”

Best lines:

“For what it’s worth, I take issue with her salmon-colored scrubs. I mean, what self-respecting surgeon wears salmon-colored scrubs?”

So true. Nurses wear colored scrubs, surgeons wear blue scrubs or hospital-issued-colored scrubs, but certainly not salmon-colored scrubs. For very interesting commentary on scrub colors, watch Nurse Jackie.

 

Yang: “Please tell me you’ve seen a cleanly severed right leg!”

Grey: “How weird is this job?”

Yes. (My weirdest moment this week was when I walked into the room of a man who was clearly touching his junk. I introduced myself and he took his hand out from under the sheets and extended it to shake my hand. I politely deferred but was internally freaking out. Well, I was freaking out and also thinking, "Some people are really right hand dominant.")

Bailey: “Why do I feel like we’re about to kill this girl?”

Well, it was funny at the time.

Yang: "I cannot go back home. It is too sunny in Los Angeles. It is sunny EVERY DAY."

Uh. So true. Except when I'm on vacation there.

"Rounds in 5 minutes."

When rounds are starting and the final 12 hours of your shift are beginning, the feeling is very good, but also exhausting, because you know you're going to spend the next 3 hours walking around and seeing the same patients you've been walking around and seeing the previous 24 hours.

“Time of death 2:51”

OK, last two notes. First, about this quote, I guess time of death is proclaimed because someone is keeping a code sheet and is writing it down, but announcing time of death after a code is not something they teach you in medical school or residency. In fact, I suspect the announcement of time of death is an instance of life imitating art. When I became a code leader, I always announced time of death because it was what I had seen on TV.

Second, I had this thought tonight: When Lawrence Dai goes out on a date (people don't date in college anymore, so maybe this isn't all that relevant), there's got to be this awkward moment during the evening when he has to tell his date, "Uh, I have to go watch Julie & Julia now." Poor guy.