We open with me sitting on my couch trying to figure out how I could have spent an hour and three minutes watching a show in which absolutely nothing seemed to happen. I saw people moving on the screen, I heard them talking and I have notes, yet nothing happened. It’s kind of amazing.
Mer VO: “Doctors give you many things; medicine, advice, and most of the time we give them our undivided attention.” We open in this show’s favorite place: an elevator. Lexie is giving Alex eyes as a group of interns enter. They start gushing about how a doctor totally saved a guy yesterday and how he never makes a mistake during rounds. He’s the best intern ever. Alex asks who they’re talking about and, unsurprisingly, it’s George. Alex starts to ask if they know he’s a repeater, but Lexie signals for him to hush up.
Meanwhile, on a different elevator, Meredith and Derek have some awkward chitchat. It’s completely obvious that Meredith is trying to hide the fact that they’re doing it from Cristina. As Cristina is not blind, deaf, nor dumb, she immediately picks up on this fact and further deduces that Meredith is tiptoeing around her because of the whole Burke situation. She decides to use this to her advantage.
Outside of the elevators, Izzie has been freaking out and waiting for George to get to work so she can find out how it went with Callie. He finally gets there and she practically pounces on him before he signals her to get away as Callie is right behind him. Izzie realizes that he still hasn’t told her.
There’s a new doctor in Seattle Grace, and it’s Grandpa Gilmore! Shouldn’t he be at Yale? Turns out, he’s Alex’s new intern. Then why didn’t he start the program with the other interns? Is that allowed? Alex looks completely freaked out by this new development, or maybe just by old people in general.
Patient time: The chief introduces a woman who has tongue cancer. She’s very talky and she has two equally talky middle-aged friends with her who remind me a lot of my mother’s friends. Sloane is trying to explain to her that he’s going to have to remove 60% of her tongue and that she may not be able to speak very well afterwards. Everybody in the room is horrified by the possibility of her not being able to talk. The Chief wants to try an experimental procedure that would allow her to have full use of her tongue. George thinks it’s too risky, and The Chief and Sloane’s feathers get all ruffled because they think George is calling them old. They decide to do the experimental procedure so they can prove their youth.
Alex, upset at the prospect of having a dude who smells like arthritis cream follow him around all day, tries to dump Norman, his old-guy intern, down in the clinic with Bailey. She’s not letting him get away without doing a little work though, so she tells Alex that he and Norman need to take a patient before he can leave. The go to curtain 3 where there’s a helicopter mom who thinks her son is on drugs because he’s lethargic, cranky and his grades have been slipping. Alex and I both think she’s overreacting, because take out the schoolwork part, and she’s describing me—and I’m sober as a judge. Norman, however, worked in a pharmacy for 30 years, so he thinks everybody is a pill head. He tells the mother that the son is totally a druggie before they even do tests.
Meanwhile, poor Izzie barely has a patient at all. She has “Really Old Guy,” who has been in a semi-coma for about a year. His room is also where Izzie and the gang have been eating lunch for the past year. Izzie, still distracted by the whole George mess, is really not feeling the whole “treat your patients like people” thing and refuses to call him anything but Really Old Guy. Really Old Guy of course chooses this moment to finally wake up and inform Izzie that his name is, in fact, Charlie.
Cristina is once again using Burke ditching her at the altar to get surgeries. This time, instead of bribing doctors with wedding gifts, she’s acting forlorn and making Meredith feel guilty. After Cristina “casually” mentions that surgeries make her feel better, Meredith switches with her and gives Cristina the tongue surgery.
Izzie’s old guy informs her that he only woke up so he can die today. Apparently spending the past year in a semi-comatose state listening to the gang jaw on and on about their ridiculous lives and personal problems has sapped him of his will to live. I think I know how he feels. He also tells Izzie that he wants lobster as his last meal—and that she’s naïve for thinking George will ever leave his wife. Ha! I love this guy.
Since Meredith switched with Cristina, she’s stuck with Lexie as her intern. A trauma comes in: there was a car accident and the patient has been down for 24 minutes. Meredith lets Lexie do her first intubation and the guy totally dies. When Meredith tells Lexie that she did a nice job for her first time, she totally freaks out on Meredith and calls her a bad doctor. She says that they should have done everything they could, and Meredith rightly points out that the dude was already dead when he came in. Meredith is sick of her hysterics, so she sends Lexie down to the clinic.
The teenager’s tox results have came back negative. Norman is shocked that the kid’s not hopped up. The kid is annoyed and tells is mom that she has apple hair and he threw the pancake into the river. Everybody looks at him and he says that what he was trying to say was that he wanted to go home. Hmm. This doesn’t look good. They order a CT scan. Stat.
Tongue lady is getting ready to go into surgery and is freaking out about the prospect of something going wrong and her not being able to talk again. She says she has so much to say. Her friends tell her to say whatever is on her mind and George, feeling like a wuss for not being able to talk to Callie jumps in and urges her to go for it; that sometimes things need to be said. Apparently what really needs to be said is that her friend wears too-tight pants and that her other friend has bad hair and worse breath. Uh, wish me luck in surgery, guys!
Really Old Guy is trying very hard to die. Izzie gets pissed and starts unplugging cords. Things get awkward when he actually stops breathing. They get the paddles out and shock him back to life. When he regains consciousness, he tells Izzie to stop forcing him to live.
Lexie arrives at the clinic and promptly starts whining to Bailey about how Meredith banished her down there because she hates her and obviously hated her mother since she killed her with hiccups and all. Bailey just looks at her like she can’t believe how ridiculous and unprofessional she’s being. She barks at Lexie that the clinic isn’t a place for strays and tells her to go give a kid stitches. Bailey goes up to find Callie and inform her that her residents are dumping interns faster than Paris Hilton dumps her pets, but Callie is doing paperwork and isn’t interested in anything Bailey has to say. She tells Bailey that she doesn’t have any fight left in her.
Old guy is still trying to prove that he can kill himself by sheer will. He closes his eyes and scrunches up his face. Izzie tells him that the only thing that’s going to accomplish is pooping his pants. He tells her that if somebody really wants to do something, then they’ll do it—meaning he’ll die if he wants to and George totally isn’t leaving his wife.
Izzie finds George and shrieks at him about how they’re supposed to be in this together and he’s leaving her hanging by not telling Callie what’s going on. He yells at her that it’s not about him and her, that it’s about him and Callie. He’s about to break up a marriage to a great woman and she needs to get off his back and let him do it in his own way and that it’s not exactly something you just blurt out to a person. Izzie backs down.
The experimental tongue surgery hits a snag and The Chief and Sloane admit that they don’t really know what they’re doing and tell George to go get Derek because he’s good with nerves. Derek comes in and takes over, but unfortunately, that’s when teenager decides to collapse. His pupil is blown and spinal fluid is backing up and putting pressure on his brain. Basically this kid is going to die and not even Bailey knows what to do. Alex runs to get Derek, but instead of leaving the surgery, he just tells Alex what to do. This entails Alex sticking a tongue depressor underneath the kid’s eyelid and taking a gigantic needle and draining the spinal fluid out from behind his eye. Aaaagghghghhh. It’s awful, but he saves the kid.
Izzie hears that Really Old Guy is checking out of the hospital against medical advice and she rushes to stop him. He’s all dressed up and sitting in a wheelchair as she tells him that he can’t leave because she’s all alone and needs someone to talk to. He, of course, is already dead. Once again, Izzie has no one.
The tongue surgery goes well and the woman is mortified by what she said to her friends and is afraid that she’s all alone now too. Just then, they come in with flowers and balloons and tell her, in the interest of full disclosure, how sucky both of her husbands were. The women are all friends again; tight pants, frizzy hair, bad marriages and all.
Since he had no friends or family, Izzie brings everybody in so they can have a scene together—er, a memorial for Really Old Guy. George says that he was cool because he didn’t snore too loud—which I’m completely in agreement with. After moving in with my boyfriend, I can unequivocally state that not snoring like a Wookie being strangled is the best quality any guy can have. Anyway, Meredith says that he never complained. Alex talks about how he hardly ever farted. Again. They are all describing the perfect guy here. He also lived through 12 surgeries and Cristina got to practice stuff on him, so all in all, he sounds pretty cool. Izzie talks about how he was a bastard, but he was a bastard who knew what he wanted and didn’t stop until he got it. So I guess this means that she’s going to ignore all conventional wisdom and wait forever for George to leave his wife. Good luck with that.
Mer VO: “The truth is painful. Nobody wants to hear the truth.” Meredith gives Lexie her mother’s death note. She wants to go over it with her so Lexie can have some closure. They have a nice moment as she tells Lexie that she was very fond of her mother.
“The truth is all we have to give.” Bailey goes back to Callie and tells her that she has been having trouble not being number one but that she realizes she has to get over it. So she’s going to be the best damn number two this hospital has ever seen and help Callie. They’ll be a team. Yay! Finally Callie has somebody on her side.
“Sometimes we need to say the truth out loud.” The interns are still going on and on about George, and Alex, having just saved that teenager by himself is feeling jealous. He tells everybody George is a repeater. Now that’s some vintage jerky Alex right there. Poor George is crushed.
“And sometimes we tell them because we owe them.” George gets back to the hotel room and finds Callie on the bed with her bags packed. She tells him to just say it. He looks at her and says, “I slept with Izzie.”
Next week: Girl Fight!
