Ghouls and Ghosts of Grey's

Every network on television will at some point make a reference to nearing holidays. Last Thursday, Grey's Anatomy fell victim to this pursuit of network execs to bump up the ratings, when the writers crafted a "Halloween-themed" Grey's. It seems as though each new resident is haunted by the ghosts of their pasts. Throw in a gruesome amputation via chainsaw, and I suppose even the dullest viewer gets the hint that Grey's Anatomy is trying to cash in on Halloween. Regardless of the blatant Halloween reference, this week's show was still very very good. Plus, the chainsaw amputation was really cool to watch.

Meredith still hasn't dealt with her mommy issues. In fact, after cremating her mother, she just stuck her mother's ashes in her closet and tried to forget about it. However, with McDreamy slowly drifting away, Meredith decides she needs to put her mother to rest for good. She seems desperate to be "normal" enough for McDreamy. However, she can't figure out what to do with her mother's ashes so she pours them into a baggy and brings them to work with her. You could say her mother is haunting her. (Halloween reference 1). At work, she runs into a little boy without ears. Although he has the ability to hear, he has no actual lobes and as a result, constantly feels as if he's in a Halloween costume (Halloween reference 2). He asks McSteamy, the resident plastic surgeon to take pity on him and build him his ears for free. McSteamy agrees as long as Meredith can get a surgical team to donate their time, and the chief to donate an OR. The only way Meredith can seem to persuade residents to donate their time is to bring the boy around to each person she needs and let him "trick or treat" for ears (Halloween reference 3). Oh yes, they went there.

Alex, too, is haunted by a person from the past. Does everyone remember Ava, the woman who had a face transplant and who Alex fell in love with? Well, she came back. Turns out, even though she left with her husband, she was sorta hoping for Alex to do the romantic thing and chase her down. When he didn't, she went back to the hospital and sort of threw herself at him. Not that she was taking a huge chance there, since Alex is obviously nuts about her, but still. Thing is, Alex is sort of a coward and probably won't commit to Ava, even though he loves her because, well, he's Alex and it's sort of his tragic human flaw to screw up every good thing that ever happens to him. Ava and Alex canoodle in the room residents use to catch some z's during super long shifts, but of course, Alex is a doctor, so he gets paged and has to leave Ava there. Ava gets tired of waiting around for him and ends up leaving. But not without her shirt, which I'm guessing she left as a souvenir, but it begs the question, what did she wear out of the hospital?

Callie announces to everyone that Izzie and George are sleeping together. Cristina is disgusted, but Meredith tries to be happy for them. That's pretty much all that happens with the Gizzie affair this week.

Bailey misses her baby's first Halloween because she volunteered to help give the boy without ears the only thing he really wants. But her husband doesn't see this as a charitable thing and hangs up on her.

Cristina and Callie laugh with one another about how horrible their love lives are. At the end of the show, Callie moves into the apartment Cristina once shared with Burke. Looks like Cristina and Callie are gonna be best buds soon.

A man comes into the hospital complaining that his foot does not belong to him. He asks Bailey to recommend him a surgeon who will amputate it. Bailey responds with "I am a surgeon and I am telling you no surgeon will amputate a perfectly good foot". Instead, she offers him a prescription for anxiety medication. Apparently, this isn't good enough for the man. So he grabs himself a chainsaw and saws his own leg off. That's right folks, this man, with no drugs in his system what-so-ever, held a chainsaw to his leg until there was nothing anyone could do to save it and it had to be amputated.

Another patient, one in need of a heart transplant, is faced with an impossible task when his daughter is killed and he is offered her heart. As next of kin, he has the choice to take her off life support and give himself her heart, but does he really want to live the rest of his life with the knowledge that his daughter's heart is beating in his chest? George is the one who finally convinces the man to take his daughter's heart when he reminds everyone that his father died of heart issues too. He says that he would have given his heart to save his father if he could.

Dr. Hahn, who we may remember from the Denny episode, is brought in as the new heart surgeon. Essentially, she is replacing Dr. Burke. Before, Cristina is aware of this, Dr. Hahn basically accuses her of sleeping her way to the top. Cristina defends herself by calling Dr. Hahn unprofessional. It is only then that Cristina learns that Hahn is her new boss. This should get interesting.

The show ends with a very touching scene. Meredith finally decides to lay her mother to rest in the the sinks outside the OR. Since her mother only ever cared about her job as a surgeon, Meredith figured this is the only place she would be happy. The chief walks in on this morbid laying to rest and helps Meredith spread the ashes. Lest we forget, he too, loved Meredith's mother deeply.

So sure, ghosts were painfully obvious this episode. Everyone's past came back to haunt them. And the chainsaw scene was a clear play for the Halloween rush. But I was enthralled with every minute of this show. And maybe it's the psych major in me, but I just love it when the characters on this show start acting insane. For instance, bringing your mother's ashes with you to work in a plastic baggie. Or, perhaps even sawing off your own leg with a chainsaw. Say what you will about Grey's Anatomy, but I am addicted.

My personal Grey's experience

I didn't exactly get a chance to see Grey's last night, so I don't have a preview for you. Why?

Cause, I spent last night in the hospital. Boy was that ever fun.

See, earlier yesterday morning, I went to health services to be checked out by a doctor. He listened to my lungs and was like holy hell we've never heard asthma that bad. So he prescribed me an artillery of drugs. I filled my prescription and I took the z-pack since the other one wasn't supposed to be started until the morning. Almost immediately I started feel cramps. Cramps that only got worse as the hours passed. And then i threw up, and it says right there on the z-pack package that you're not supposed to do that. So I called health services again, told them my problems and they basically said, um, get down here now. So i got myself dressed, slowly, since the blinding pain in my abdomen was nearly unbearable, and i walked myself to health services with tears running down my face from the pain. The people at health services didn't know what the hell to do so they told me they were calling an ambulance and sending me to the hospital. Alone. I freaked out and called my roommate, Laura, who is a nursing student and she hurried over from target and ran through health services to be there for me. So she came with me to the hospital.

The ambulance got there and the EMT guy loaded me into the back. He told me I had to lie on the gurney. I asked him if that was absolutely necessar. After all, i had gotten all the way to the ambulance on my own the two feet. I just got a look. So i laid down on the gurney and got hooked up to all kinds of beepy machines and got an IV put in. So I rode in the back of an ambulance for the first time ever. Then they loaded me into the hospital on the gurney. First time ever. Once at the hospital they put me in a wheelchair with an place to hang my IV. I got to tell you, I felt kind of old sitting in a wheelchair hooked up to an IV with a blanket sitting in my lap. They brought me into some little room with a computer so some lady could take my information. And then the vomiting started up again. Several times. Do you know how hard it is to tell a nurse your home address and phone number while puking up everything you have left in your body?Anyways, then they let me sit in the waiting room for about three hours. Where I continued to have blinidng pain and random bouts of nausea. During this time it occured to me that I had to call my mom. If I didn't call her and tell her I was in the hospital, I knew she would be really upset. But at the same time, I knew she would freak out. So I called her and did everything I could to calm her down. I even let Laura talk to her. Nothing was doing it. So she got off the phone and called my aunt, who works in the pacU of salem hospital. And my aunt came down in the middle of her shift to check up on me. Family, right. I was finally seen, hooked up to another IV, this time with lots of different meds and stuff for the nausea (which didn't work). Had two nebulizer treatments because the pain was acting up my asthma. And got a chest x ray to make sure i don't have pneumonia. I don't. Yay!

As I was sitting there waiting, Laura was taking pictures of all the different things they were doing to me. Nursing majors, what are you gonna do with them, right? Then some nurse moved me out into the hall because a trauma was incoming and they needed my room. I continued to just sit there, with no more treatments left to take and nothing to do for about another hour, cause my doctor was nowhere to be seen to discharge me.When my aunt got out of work, she came down and got the ball rolling. Turns out, she has a friend in the ER, who discharged me. My aunt took out my IV and i was ready to go.

Thing was, no one could give me anything for the pain in my stomach so, I just have to ride it out until the Z pack gets out of my system. Turns out, that was the problem all along. Seriously bad reaction to the Z- pack, the heaviest, longest lasting antibiotic health services could muster up. And even though the pain isn't as intense or frequent, i still have it and will continue to have it until the Z-pack gets out of my system. Yay.

Did i mention i'm not a huge fan of hospitals, unless i'm watching them on tv?

Ah, there's the Grey's I know and love

This week's Grey's Anatomy was a return to the typical drama of the past. However, one storyline bugged me alot. Revamped storylines don't really hold the "oh my god" quality that I, personally, have gotten used to.

The writer's have decided to revive the theme of Cristina's competetive nature with Grey. Only this time, the Grey is Lexie. Lexie and McDreamy are bonding over Meredith, which leads to McDreamy being extra nice to the baby Grey. Of course, this gets to Cristina because in Cristina's world, all praise is awarded by merit. And since she has done everything in her power to be the best at everything, in her head, the praise belongs to her. Turns out, McDreamy was only trying to get Cristina to lighten up on Lexie and actually teach her, instead of telling her to get the hell out of the way so she could perform the surgery herself and keep all the credit for being brilliant.

The Gizzie affair hangs over the entire show. Callie knows about Izzie and George, and decides to forgive George because "they took vows" yadda yadda yadda. But at the end of the episode, she takes it back. She doesn't really forgive him at all. Callie confronts Izzie and tells her to meet her in the cafeteria at noon. It's all very high school, which I'm sure the writers were going for, since they seem to have found their target audience once again. But has no one else noticed the fractured flow since last episode? One week ago, the show was about being old, now the show is about high school drama and chick fights? Where is the consistency?

Alex finds out that Izzie and George are sleeping together and we find out that his torch for Izzie never really went out. Or perhaps his ego is bruised because Izzie slept with George, but refused to sleep with Alex after the whole Denny thing. But at the same time, Ava is still a big thing for Alex, too. So who does Alex really love? This is the question.

Norman, the really old intern I mentioned last week, accidentally tells a patient that she's going to die, when in reality, she only came in to get moles removed. The patient checks out before Meredith catches the mistake and proceeds to quit her job, put up her apartment, dump her boyfriend and buy a ticket to Iceland so she can start really living the rest of her life. McSteamy is put in charge of settling with the patient to prevent her from suing. After a new, four bedroom house, the patient isn't so upset about the wrong prognosis.

The chief's neice returns to the hospital with a huge lump in her throat, which prevents her from breathing correctly. It's the result of a resurgence of ovarian cancer throughout her chest and lungs. The prognosis doesn't look good and she decides at the age of 18, that she no longer wants to fight her cancer. She wants to go home and die in peace, and spend the rest of her days with her friends and family. The chief's wife, makes this about the baby she lost and sees her neice as the child she never had. She puts the chief in charge of changing their neice's mind, which is not something he can really ethically do, since he's emotionally involved in the case. But Grey's Anatomy doesn't really concern itself with silly little things like ethics. Anyways, the chief lets his neice decide for herself what she wants to do after presenting her with all her options and he places himself firmly back in the doghouse with his wife.

But the highlight of the entire episode is:


ready for it...


McDreamy told Meredith he wanted to marry her!
Ok, so he didn't really ask her. Why would he? Meredith is commitment phobic. But he says he'll wait for her to be ready... with one stipulation. Should he meet someone who is ready before Meredith is, well, maybe he and Meredith won't be so happily ever after.

But, oh man! He wants to marry her. I'm still giddy.


My hopes are high for the rest of the series. I'll make a weak episode allowance every now and then, simply because love like this is strong enough to forgive mistakes. But I'm not sure I'll have to make very many of those allowances in the future.

Grey's is back.

What Happened to Grey's Anatomy?

Seriously, what happened to Grey's Anatomy? This past week's episode was mind numbingly dull. Each time a commercial break came along I was tempted to change the channel, but my faith in the gloriously over the top soap opera that is Grey's Anatomy kept me from changing it, hoping that something interesting would happen in the next segment of the show. It didn't. Izzie spent the entire show trying to keep a patient whom the group lovingly named "really old guy" from killing himself after he woke up from a year long coma. Alex gets stuck with an intern who is old enough to be his grandfather and is just as naive about medicine as any ordinary grandpa. Alex's intern keeps getting in Alex's way and inhibits his ability to diagnose patients simply because Alex feels weird about disciplining an intern that is old enough to be his grandfather. But i don't buy it. Alex has respect for no one. In fact, later in the show, he tells all of George's fellow interns that he is, in fact, a repeat intern and not some genius of medicine. Why would he suddenly have this honorable feeling of respecting one's elder? Meredith's break up sex has reverted to secret break up sex, all in the name of sheltering poor Cristina, who no longer has Burke. I'm sorry, but since when has Cristina ever needed to be protected. Nothing gets to Cristina. Not even being dumped by Burke, apparently. When Cristina finds out Meredith has been secretly sleeping with McDreamy, she milks her abandonment at the alter. She puts on the most unbelievable sad act anytime she's around Meredith, but instantly perks up the second Meredith walks away. This leads to Meredith giving Cristina her surgery, all in the name of cheering Cristina up. McSteamy and the Chief preform a surgery neither of them have done before to prove that 'old dogs can learn new tricks', which crosses all borders of medically ethical, if you ask me. But i'm no nursing major, so what do i know? Long story short, McDreamy comes in and saves the day, and voila, the patient has the ability to speak again. Lexie continues to bother the crap out of me. Lexie is assigned to Meredith in this episode, and in the name of higher education, Meredith allows Lexie to practice an intubation on a guy who has been dead for fifteen minutes prior to his arrival. Lexie freaks out because her first intubation didn't go as well as hoped and the patient dies. The patient who was already dead before going to the hospital dies, and Lexie blames Meredith for not saving him. She insists that a good doctor would intubate herself instead of letting an intern learn how to. This ends with Lexie asking Meredith what kind of doctor she is, and I just want to crawl through the screen and smack her. Why has no one noticed that Lexie isn't strong enough for medicine? Anyways, the episode ends with Callie asking George to say out loud that he slept with Izzie, since both of them already know this is fact. Big whoop. It was entirely anti-climactic. George told Callie something she already knew. And if we're to be honest with ourselves, George knew that Callie knew. So really, what is the secret here? I mean seriously, is Grey's Anatomy getting old? Have all the storylines been done? Say it ain't so. I will chalk this week up to tired writers. I'll even go so far as to assume one of them had a mid-life crisis. But if this series is targeted towards college aged women, why was the show so focused on old age?

Did he say meth baby?

It’s very rare that a patient on Grey’s Anatomy steals the show entirely from the tangled plotlines of the characters. However, this week, the only thing that really caught my attention was the meth baby. That’s right, I said meth baby. His parents had a meth lab right there in the apartment, and the baby was crawling around in the residue left on the floor, the walls and basically everything in the apartment. And the reason he was even in the hospital was because that very same meth lab blew up an entire apartment building. Wow. Alex is the first one to detect that something is amiss with this baby; first because he won’t stop crying and second, Alex’s super smelling powers detected the scent of crystal meth on his skin and in his hair. After a tox-screen confirmed his suspicions, Alex, being Alex, confronts the father about his obviously poor parenting skills. The father, currently high and skittish about being sent to jail, punches Alex out, steals the baby and disappears. The chief of surgery blames Callie, new chief resident, for this oversight. As if she doesn’t have enough problems. George decides he needs to tell Callie that their marriage is over, since he’s now in love with Izzie. But when Izzie is assigned to work with Callie all day, she convinces him to delay the admission for a while. How long is a while, exactly? In the meantime, Izzie and George refuse to be physical with each other until Callie is aware that she and George are headed for divorce. There's an awesomely sultry scene in which they essentially torture/tease each other before Izzie finally walks away, agreeing that its only right to tell Callie before they start racking up the adulterous interludes. But when Izzie acts nervously and continues to drop surgical tools when Callie is the room, Callie puts two and two together and comes to the conclusion that Izzie and George are having an affair. She’s right, but I find it difficult to believe that a few clumsy maneuvers automatically add up to being “the other woman”. As predicted, Meredith and McDreamy are not really broken up. They’re just having emotionless sex. Well, emotionless on Meredith’s end. And even though it kills McDreamy to be with a closed off, emotionally stunted woman, it hurts him even more to walk away. Apparently, McDreamy and McSteamy are buds now. All the hostility is gone and they casually talk about the issues in McDreamy’s relationship with Meredith. McSteamy is even sent on a wingman mission to blow Meredith off for McDreamy. I'm sorry, but what happened to the fist fights? Didn't he still sleep with your wife and then try to hit on your mistress? Forgive and forget, i guess... Cristina spends the entire episode hiding from Mama Burke, who came to the hospital to get her key so she could pick up some of Burke’s things. And by that, she meant everything except the furniture. When Cristina returns home, it’s to a completely barren apartment. Mama Burke is such a sweet lady (note the sarcasm). Now Cristina really does have nothing, when just a few episodes ago, she was about to have everything. And just to really drive home the point, Mama Burke emphasises the point that Cristina could have been one of the greatest heart surgeons in the world if Burke hadn't left her, since he was her teacher as well as her fiancee. Nice lady. Lexie continues to try for a relationship with Meredith. (Have I mentioned yet that Lexie bugs the crap out of me?) But yet again, Meredith refuses to have anything to do with her. Lexie points out that they have the same father. Meredith counters with the fact that her father left when she was five, and that was not the kind of father Lexie had to grow up with. She blames her inability to have a functional and healthy relationship with McDreamy on her father’s abandonment, and since Lexie was a factor in that abandonment, Meredith resolves never to talk to her. The conversation brings Lexie to tears. Poor baby. But the meth baby overshadows all of this. In fact, his treatment is about half the show. I found myself caring more about what would happen to the baby than who was sleeping with whom this week. And in case you were wondering, the baby was treated and sent to live with his grandmother while his parents were carted off to jail. What a great way to start you're life, huh?