Jo had been working all night long, these new interns never knew how to handle the long hours which just ended up extending the hours she had to put in to correct everyone else's mistakes. It hadn't helped that one of her interns had to piss of Meredith Grey-Shepherd. For some reason, there was always one intern who thought that they could best the good doctor. Interns just know how mean she can be, but they haven't been at the hospital long enough to understand why she is the way she is. They don't understand how she can be so caring and loving towards the other attendings and her children not to mention how well she can interact with her patients but so cruel and heartless towards everyone else.

She might have been more angry if it didn't bring back memories of a conversation she had with Dr. Hunt so many years ago. As she desperately looked towards the man and asked, "Why is she so mean?" and he had replied with, what at the time she didn't realize to be such a true statement, "Doctor Grey is not mean, she is strong."

Jo hadn't been privy to the entire story, but now she knew.

Meredith Grey Shepherd had found the love of her life as an intern only to find out that he was married. She was the idiot to stick her hand in a body cavity to keep a bomb steady that went off and she had to see the bomb squad get blown into nothing but pink mist. She nearly drowned during an on site surgeon consultation. Her mother, who never was all that motherly, suffered from Alzheimer before dying. Her father left her when she was five and didn't return until his new wife was admitted for the hiccups and died, he then became a drunk. His daughter from his new family became a surgeon and after Meredith finally accepted her as family, She, Lexie, Arizona, Derek, Mark, and Cristina all boarded a small plane that crashed. Lexie and Mark died, Arizona lost a leg, Derek's hand was almost crushed to the point that he wasn't going to be able to use it. Before the plane crash, a gunman had decided that Derek and Lexie needed to pay for the death of his wife and he went to shoot up the hospital. He succeeded in shooting Derek and while attempting to perform surgery on him, Meredith stood in front of the gunman, begging him to kill her and leave everyone else alive. During this shooting, she had a miscarriage. Her friend George was hit by a bus days before he was going to join the army. Her other friend, Izzie, got cancer and after she lived through that she left and was never heard from again. She adopted one child from Africa who was in Seattle for major surgery. She then had a kid during a blackout that didn't go very well, but some how both she and the baby are fine. Then her best friend left the country, she found out that her mother gave birth to her half sister when she was five that she had forgotten about, and then her husband died. And after all of this, she had another daughter.

That woman has gone through everything and with every event she has overcome over the past 15 or so years has proven that she is unstoppable and nothing can stand in her way. So now Jo understood what Dr. Owen Hunt meant when he says "She is strong". And now whenever some new intern begins complaining about the bitch that is Meredith Grey Shepherd, Jo just smiles. They will eventually hear all the rumors and they too will understand, because she isn't mean, it just takes a really long time for her to trust that a person is going to stick around.

So, I keep seeing a collection of pictures on Pinterest that focus on the scene between Hunt and Jo where the idea of Meredith being mean comes up. It inspired this quick story about how much Meredith has had to go through, not to mention the fact that I probably missed a few significant events.

Let Me Know.

KI