Disclaimer: I own nothing, unfortunately. If I did, well, to be honest, Arizona would still have leg. But, yeah. I don't own anything. Title comes from Amanda Shires' song "When You Need A Train It Never Comes." This story doesn't exactly fit with what the song's talking about, but I still found it fitting. Maybe it's just me. But, I don't own that either. It's a good song though. Check it out.
Author's Note: I wanted to get this out there before the new episode. I'm not 100% sure why, because I really don't think it would affect much.. But whatever. Here it is, somewhat rushed, but at the same time I think I'm happy with it. Anyway, let me know what you think, please. (:
When You Need A Train It Never Comes.
She is an orthopedic surgeon. She fixes bones for a living. She puts them back in place, moves them around, rebuilds hands from scratch and develops artificial cartilage. She is an orthopedic surgeon and one of the best. If you have the choice she's the one you want operating on your bones. She's the one you want to fix you.
So Arizona thought she had it made. Femur sticking out of her leg? Well, that sucks, but she's got an awesome ortho surgeon as a wife. Just give Callie some time and she can fix it. She can fix anything. She's a rockstar with a scalpel.
And she won't admit it now, but at the time, Callie was almost relieved when they rolled Arizona in and her worst injury was a fracture. That is her comfort zone. She was sure that she would be able to find a way to fix it. She wouldn't have to wait on answers from Teddy or Shepherd or any of the unfamiliar surgeons from Boise; she could read x-rays like the back of her hand and she dealt with simple fractures so often that sometimes she got tired of them.
Except this wasn't a simple fracture. And she doesn't think she'll ever take any fracture so lightly again.
She was supposed to be able to fix it. Arizona was counting on her to fix it. But she examined that x-ray more closely than she'd examined one in what felt like years and she looked more deeply at options than she thinks she ever has. She went over every option she could think of and ideas that she came up with on the spot but she kept coming up empty.
"Please don't give up on me," Arizona had pleaded, and Callie felt her heart break. She was never going to give up. She couldn't give up.
But there wasn't much that she could do, either.
She went over every option once, twice, three times. The ones she liked the best she looked at four or five. But nothing was going to be able to work. There was no chance, no high risk – just failure. Just impossible. She would have jumped at slim odds but there were no odds. She had only one choice.
Well, two choices, really. One was let Arizona die. The second was cut off her leg.
So she cut off her wife's leg.
Not really. Some surgeon from Boise actually did the cutting. She just sat in the gallery feeling numb and empty, wishing she could at least cry, and watched him perform a surgery she'd done multiple times. Except this time it was on her wife. It was Arizona's leg he was sawing, pulling off the table, sending away to the incinerator –
She wishes there had been another option. Sometimes she thinks that maybe there was, and if she had only dug a little bit deeper, she would have found it. Sometimes she sits down on the couch with her laptop or in front of a hospital computer and she goes over all the details of Arizona's injury in her head. She looks for more answers. She looks to see if there's anything she missed. Or maybe there's something new that wasn't out there yet. Maybe she'll find something that leads to a breakthrough and lets her prevent this from happening to somebody else. It's nothing but another way of torturing herself, but she can't make herself stop.
And sometimes she feels so defeated by the whole thing, so destroyed by her own feeling of guilt, that she just wants to quit. She doesn't want to risk screwing up on somebody else's wife. Somebody's child, parent, grandparent. She's unsure, self-conscious, shaky where she once was firm.
Maybe it wouldn't be so bad if Arizona was at least trying to get better. Maybe then Callie could begin to move on. But Arizona has yet to heal and move on, and so neither has Callie. They are stuck together in a limbo, both wanting to heal and not wanting to heal at the same time. Moving on sounds great, but then what would they do with all this anger that has been building up?
Sometimes, Arizona lets a little bit of it out. She shouts "I hate you" as loud as she can. Or sometimes she whispers it, and that is always worse. Sometimes Callie shakes her head and slams the door behind her. Sometimes Callie just stands there and feels the silent tears tracking down her face. Sometimes she yells back. Sometimes she acts like she didn't hear it – she keeps talking or changing her clothes or wheeling Arizona to the bathroom.
But every single time, she feels it stab at her heart. Every single time she feels it beating her down just a little bit more. She can never make herself blame Arizona for feeling that way. She can never make herself angry at Arizona. What hurts the most is a mixture of knowing that Arizona feels that way about her and knowing that she feels that way about herself.
Sometimes Arizona says that she doesn't know if she will ever be able to forgive Callie for cutting off her leg. Every time Callie pretends like she doesn't hear, because she doesn't know that she'll ever be able to forgive herself for not trying just a little bit harder, either.
There's nothing else she could have done. Logically, she knows that. The surgeon in her knows that she exhausted every possible option. She looked at more than was even relevant and tried to come up with her own ways to fix a problem that simply didn't have a solution. There was no saving Arizona's leg, and some part of Callie knows this.
The part that wins every time, however, is the part that isn't logical. The part that isn't a surgeon. The emotional part, the part that would have done nothing but search for answers for years just to let her wife keep her leg. The part that sits in the lab every time she gets a chance, working on developing new, better prosthetics. The part of her that wishes there was something else she could have done and the part of her that just won't let it go.
Callie wishes she could let it go. She wishes she could stop feeling this way, if only for a few minutes. The guilt and the blame is eating her alive and she isn't sure how much longer she can stand to hate herself. She wishes more than anything that she could just let it go and move on.
But she is an orthopedic surgeon, and she used to be one of the best. She was an ortho goddess, a rockstar with a scalpel, until she couldn't even save her own wife's leg.