A/N: I'm just going to post this first chapter as it is to see if I get any feedback. If you read it and like it, please tell me so I can add more :)

As a doctor, it's important to be adaptable to change. Personally, I feel I have a certain talent when it comes to dealing with big changes.

'I take to change like a fish to water,' I assure my close friend and fellow doctor, Elliot Reid, leaning on the counter of the nurse's station and smiling confidently, 'I'm like a bird taking to the sky, a raindrop taking to the ocean-'

'An idiotically grinning face taking to this clipboard?' Asks the familiar voice of Doctor Perry Cox.

'What?' I ask, turning to him and being met in the idiotically grinning face by the inevitable and infamous clipboard.

'Ow!' I exclaim, clutching my left cheek.

'Guess so,' Doctor Cox grins cruelly before taking a pen from his coat pocket and adding a note to a patient's chart, still chuckling to himself, 'Cracks me up,' I hear him mutter, 'Gets me every time.'

I glare at his back and rub my smarting face.

'I'm going to have a bruise there in the morning,' I tell Elliot pathetically, 'I bruise like a peach!'

She ignores me and continues to scribble in the medical chart that I've been distracting her from.

'So yeah,' I say, starting from where I left off, 'I take to change like a fish to water.'

'JD!' she snaps, her voice piercing and stressed, 'Why are you telling me this?'

'Because this morning I used a new brand of hair mousse,' I smile nonchalantly, my head cocked to one side, 'And I'm okay with it.'

She stares at me, her mouth contorted in what I can only guess is a mixture of annoyance and disbelief.

'Your hair looks exactly the same!' She cries.

'Ah,' I smile knowingly, 'See that's the thing, this brand gives slightly more volume so that-'

'Come on there, Margaret,' says Doctor Cox, reappearing from nowhere and hauling me away from Elliot by the scruff of my neck, 'Or do you prefer Maggie?'

Doctor Perry Cox is what you might call my mentor. In a strange, roundabout way, we rely on each other to function properly in our lives at Sacred Heart Hospital. I don't mean to sound sappy, but we need each other. I know, for certain, that he will always be here to call me a girl's name, expose me to some unwanted violence and occasionally make me feel like a semi-decent doctor.

'Okay, Newbie, listen up,' he says, 'I'm heading out of town for a couple days and, puh-lease take note, while I'm gone I would like all of my patients to continue to keep,' he pauses and puts his face a little closer to mine, 'Living,' he finishes.

'But I'm a little-' I try to ask.

'Woah there, Linda,' he interrupts me, his eyes wide, 'You'd better say teapot, because you do not know the meaning of the word "busy".'

He doesn't wait for a reply, and instead fixes me with a stern stare before charging past me, headed for the wards and growling quietly under his breath.

'So when-?' I try again.

'Today, darling, today,' he calls sarcastically over his shoulder.

'And why-?' I attempt.

'None of your damn business,' I hear him shout before he turns a corner and disappears from view.

I toss my newly volumised hair and turn my back on him.

'I am not a little teapot,' I inform Laverne, a nurse not famous for her patience with me.

'Mhm,' she replies, one eyebrow raised in my direction.

I drop my gaze to the floor, 'Aw, come on, I'm a medium-sized teapot at least.'

As the day goes on, I begin to realise exactly how beautiful embracing change can be. Without Doctor Cox breathing down my neck, I'm free for the first time in a long time to do things my way.

'I'm Doctor Dorian,' I tell that day's new patients, smiling reassuringly.

'Feel free to call Lucy here by her first name,' I hear Doctor Cox butt in, the way he always does, only this time the only person who hears him is me. There is nobody around to lecture me infront of my patients and my interns, or to criticise every medical decision I make.

I sit down at a table in the hospital canteen where my best friend Chris Turk, his wife Carla and Elliot are already sitting with a broad grin on my face. They all look up at me with the same sympathetic, almost pitying expression. Carla reaches out and gently pats my hand with hers.

'Hey Bambi, how you holding up?' She asks kindly.

'We heard about Doctor Cox,' Turk adds, concern clear in his voice.

'Are you okay?' Elliot asks, her blue eyes round with worry.

I beam at them all, oblivious to their odd reactions.

'Okay?' I ask, 'I'm great!'

Their eyes widen as one.

'Really?' Carla asks.

'Now I get to do everything my way,' I tell them, 'I love change. Did you know that? Change is my new favourite thing. In fact, just this morning-'

'Oh, JD, don't start with the hair mousse again!' Elliot complains.

I halt mid-sentence.

'Fine,' I reply haughtily, my nose in the air, 'I will find someone who isn't afraid of change like you guys.'

I lift my lunch tray and flounce away across the room.

A moment later I'm back.

'You chickens,' I add, scathingly.