Hope you like it...
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A surgical residency is all about training for the worst. But as prepared as we might be, we usually don't see disaster coming. We can try to envision the worst-case scenario to foresee catastrophe. But when true disaster strikes, it often comes out of nowhere.
"Okay, tell me is this real? I've always secretly wanted to do this." Derek smiled and looked at Meredith while they were driving through Washington states' conifer forest. "Take the day off -just you me and the kids. We're gonna do this a whole lot more when we get home. Ride the ferryboat… all day if we want. I love you, Meredith!" Going on a family trip was something he hadn't gotten around to do in a long time.
"I love you! And this was the best ferryboat ride we ever had!" Meredith said. The weather had been classic Seattle and the water had been incredibly blue.
"48 uninterrupted hours?" Derek wondered.
"Hardly uninterrupted… we are taking the Kids with us." Meredith giggled "You can be glad that they are asleep"
"I want to spend the rest of my life with you!" He took her hand and kissed the back of her hand.
"and I want to spend the rest of my life with you!" Meredith smiled softly.
He couldn't believe how blessed he had really been all these years since waking up on her living room floor. "Do you realize that we never had a honeymoon? We were always way too busy…"
"surviving an unusual number of bad things." Meredith giggled. It was true. They had survived a ferryboat crash, a bomb explosion, a shooting, a car crash and a plane crash.
"So this is good… for a second I thought it was because you didn't trust me enough to go alone" Derek smiled. By now Meredith had forgiven him, but there was something she needed to talk to him about. Only Maggie knew so far. "or maybe there was something I wanted to tell you… but this has to wait until we arrive in DC." Meredith smiled.
The second time it happens, it's even faster than the first. One moment, everything in your life is promise and planning.
The phone rang and Derek used the hands-free equipment to accept the call when Amelia popped up on the on-board Screen of his Porsche's Information System "You're never gonna make your flight." Amelia teased him.
"I'll make it." Derek insisted and took Meredith's hand. He knew that everybody else was still unaware that she had asked Richard to cover her service for her and come with him instead.
"No, you won't." Amelia told him while she was standing in the middle of the OR.
"You're gonna miss your flight." Someone interrupted their fraternal call.
"Who's that? Bailey?" Derek laughed "I'm not gonna miss my flight."
"There was a huge accident on the 5. All the lanes are closed. The traffic is insane." April told them. They knew. They had been stuck on the 5 for almost thirty minutes.
"Now, why does Kepner make that sound like it's a good thing?" Derek wondered.
"We have a guy from the accident on our table. Bailey and Kepner are sewing up all the holes in his gut. I am repairing the un-repairable. I am out-of-control amazing." Amelia smiled "I'm a superhero. You get that? Your little sister is being a superhero."
"No, I am out-of-control amazing. You are a guest in my guts. Hush. The point is you might as well turn around now 'cause you'll miss your flight." April smiled "There's so much surgery, you might forget everything around you. It's like this crazy high"
"I'm not gonna miss my flight. I have a secret shortcut." Derek smiled and took Meredith's hand.
"There are no shortcuts to the airport." Amelia insisted.
"That you know about." Derek nodded. She had only ever left Seattle once since she arrived while he had driven the way quite a few times since his job in DC had started. There had been quite a few lose ends that he had neede to tie up.
"Come on. I'm doing a spondylolisthesis today. I'm saying if you head back now, I might let you
I'm gonna lose you here in a second. Cellphone reception's bad." Derek lied to cut them off because Meredith had started to giggle.
"Derek, are you still there? I can't hear you." Amelia wondered.
"No, I said I'm gonna lose the cellphone reception. It's bad here. - Amy? –" Derek hung up and looked at his laughing wife. "You could have told her you were with me..."
"She's annoying...an you shouldn't have lied about the cell phone reception" Meredith smiled.
They drove in silence for a few minutes until Derek tried to get Meredith to confess to him what she had been hiding in the bath room "Well, let's, uh, let's talk honeymoon."
"We're headed to DC. I thought this was our honeymoon." Meredith giggled.
"No, Meredith, This is just the just the beginning." Derek inhaled deeply
"So what about Paris? I went there after med School." Meredith suggested.
"Too cold. I want the beach. Mm. And you know I've always wanted to go to Bali" he told her.
"Yeah? Bali, Indonesia, huh?- Mm-hmm." Meredith turned around and looked at Bailey who had just opened his eyes and started to get fuzzy "hey, buddy, what do you think about a 23-hour plane ride, huh?"
"No?" Derek laughed "Okay, we'll just dose him with Gravol and scotch."
"Bali it is." Meredith smiled.
Their laughter was interrupted by another call. "Hi Owen" Meredith giggled.
"Meredith? I thought your name was on the board." She clarified.
"Pushed it and took a day off."
"I'm glad I was able to catch you which means you are not at the Airport yet." He told them.
"Got Held up in traffic!" Derek nodded.
"Okay, Derek. Meredith. Guys, I didn't wanna have to do this, but we're kind of out of options." He told them. In the background he order someone "Hey, I want all those extra beds lining the hallway for the overflow patients." Afterwards he managed to focus on their conversation again. "Did you hear about the pile-up?"
"Do you need us to come back in?" Meredith wondered.
"No, that's not why I'm calling. There's another problem." He paused "City's in gridlock. Almost every ambulance is tied up on the highway." He told them before he was interrupted again "Rosa, can you go to the lab and get all the O-neg and plasma that they have? Thank you. " He sighed "Listen, dispatch called. Passenger van and a sportscar lost control and overturned. They want us to send someone to buy time until an ambulance frees up. The accident is on your way up to the airport. Guys, listen. There are kids."
"Oh. We have to." Derek looked at Meredith "Text us the address."
"Okay. Thank you. Oh. And hey, love birds, I heard the news. Congratulations." He smiled and hung up. Meredith made a mental note to kill her sister for telling everyone around the hospital about her secret.
The next second,everything is upside down. Life as you knew it to come hangs in the there's nothing left for anyone to do but hope.
The scene of the accident a few miles down the road. They saw a mini van and the sports car Owen had mentioned. "You stay with the kids" Derek told her. "I'll take care of them"
"The kids are sleeping and you can't save everyone" Meredith insisted. "The kids will be fine"
The ran to the van "Ma'am. " he tried to get the driver -a woman her her late thirties or early fourties- to talk to him.
"Winnie?" she cried.
"My name's Derek. Are you okay?" he wondered.
"Winnie! Winnie! Winnie! Winnie!" she kept yelling the name.
"Hey, I can't open the door." He tried his best
"Ma'am. What's your name?" Meredith tried to calm her down.
"Sarah."
"Sarah, who's Winnie?" Meredith asked. Her voice was calm. She was used to this level of trauma. This wasn't unfamiliar, she was in control. Years of training had helped to keep a level head in a situation like this.
"My my daughter. She's, uh, she's in the back. She's not answering, and I don't know - if she's okay." The woman cried. -
"Sarah. Sarah, I need you to stay calm, okay? Deep breaths." Meredith told her and looked at Derek "Good. Stay calm. I'm gonna be right back, okay? Try not to move."
Derek climbed on top of the car and looked through the back window "Okay. - Hey. You Winnie? Is anything hurt, like your neck or ? Is that why you can't talk?"
The girl looked at him with her brown eyes "I think I'm dead. Am I dead?"
"Let me feel your wrist." He looked at the girl and felt a pulse "Well, you're not dead. I can feel a pulse in your wrist. You know what that means?"
"What?" the little girl wondered.
"It means your heart's still beating. And you can't be dead if your heart's still beating. You see, I'm a doctor, and I'm telling you if you ever want to know you're dead, feel your pulse. I can feel it." He smile.
"I'm not dead." The girl told her mother "I'm not dead, mommy!"
"She's okay?!" the woman looked at Meredith with tears in her eyes.
"Okay, she's fine." Meredith nodded. "Okay, I'm gonna check on the other driver"
"You're leaving us?" Winnie asked in panic.
"What? No." Derek smiled.
"I can't I can't move. I am stuck." The woman cried.
"Hello? Hello? Hello?" Meredith ran to get closer to the other car which had stopped quite far away from the other car.
"Help! Help! Help! Hey." Someone yelled. She found a teenager girl who was laying in the bushes.
"Can you tell me your name?" Meredith wondered. She was taken back to the ambulance crash she ha had when Alex and she had picked up a premature baby.
"Alana. - Alana." The girl said with short breaths "It's hard to breathe."
"Okay. All right. Let's take a second. You probably got the wind knocked out of you when you hit the ground." Meredith said and wondered whether she should start doing neurological tests. "Follow my finger. Lucky you didn't hit the pavement. - Yeah. you feel any pain?"
"I don't I don't think so." The teenager told her.
"Does it hurt anywhere?" she wondered.
"No." The girl said and started to cry "I'm not supposed to be here. I have to go. - I I have to go. I have to go." She got up and Meredith held on to her.
"Careful. Careful." Meredith said and followed her while she was tumbling back to the street.
"I have to call my mom. Where's my phone?" she wondered and looked to the ground "My phone's not working. Why is my phone not working?"
"Listen to me. Listen to me. You're probably in shock, okay? You have a lot of adrenaline going through you right now." Meredith tried to get her to sit down "There might be something wrong with you that you don't feel right now, so I need you - to slow down. - Okay. All right. Can you tell me what day it is?"
"Thursday. I'm supposed to be at school. In chem. We have a quiz." The girl told her.
"Is that why you were driving so fast?" Meredith wondered.
"I wasn't driving." The girl stated.
"Who was driving?" Meredith wondered. If she wasn't the driver, someone else was here.
"Charlie. It's his dad's car." The girl said and Meredith hurried to check if there was anyone inside the car that was still flipped over on the wrong side of the road.
"Help me get him out of there." Meredith interrupted his husband's efforts to get the woman out of the car.
"What's wrong with him? Why isn't he saying anything? Charlie?" Alana whispered hysterically.
"He hit his head really hard. I need to find a first-aid kit." Meredith ran to their car and looked in the trunk. "Oh, you got to be kidding me." She mumbled when she couldn't find one.
Suddenly Derek saw smoke from the sportscar "Hey! - Alana, run!" Meredith yelled as her husband was running towards the car.
"What about Charlie?" the girl wondered as Derek was trying to get the boy out of the car wreck.
"Get away from the car!" Meredith yelled "Come on, Charlie, you got to get up. - Get up!" Derek pulled the boy out seconds before the car exploded.
"Meredith. What's wrong with me? Is it my stomach? - Is it bleeding?" the girl looked at her and suddenly Meredith saw the girl's injuries.
"It's okay." She tried to calm her down -it wasn't. Her intestine was hanging out of her abdominal cavitiy.
"Am I dying? I want to know." The girl insisted.
"No, no, no. " Meredith tried to calm her down. "You have a little cut in your tummy. It's gonna be okay. It's no big deal. I can take care of it." Usually she would have been able to. In an OR it was an injury an intern could have handled.
"How are you gonna fix it? You don't know. Oh, my god, I'm gonna die out here." The girl saw it in her face.
"Can you stop saying that? It's insulting. I don't let people die. I'm very good at my job, even next to the roadside, okay?" Meredith told her "I usually do this in ORs"
"And very modest about it, too." Derek teased her.
"Shut up!" Meredith told him. Meredith and Derek laughed when Meredith realized that they had picked up Derek's dry-cleaning in the morning.
Alana and Winnie were sitting by Meredith's side. Derek was close by trying to reestablish the blood flow in the woman's leg. Winne helped Meredith to cut the dry cleaning bags. Minutes later she started to wrap the girl up to seal off the tear until she got to the OR "So, Charlie kissed you this morning. - Was that your first kiss?" Meredith wondered.
"Yes. Except for the guy who plays second-chair cello. He doesn't count."
"Why?" Winnie wondered.
"It was just practice kissing. So, should I be practicing?" the girl looked at Meredith.
"No." Meredith looked up from the woun.
"Yeah, but she just" Winnie tried to argue, but Meredith knew how to be the adult in a situation like this "But how much trouble do you think she's gonna be in when her mother finds out what she's been up to today?"
"She has a point. I'm not your role model. I don't think kissing Charlie was worth all this." Alana sighed.
"Every kiss before the right kiss doesn't count anyway. I've kissed a lot of women. The first time I kissed my wife, well I mean, she wasn't my wife then. She was just this girl in a bar." He said and looked at Meredith "And when we kissed, it it was like I got to tell you, it was like I never kissed any other woman before. It was like the first kiss. The right kiss."
Meredith looked into Derek's eyes and smiled.
Alana looked up and heard the siren "The ambulance is coming." Meredith smiled.
"Here we go. Help is on its way. Help is here." Derek told Winnie while her mother was put onto a gurney "You'll be all right. You'll be okay."
They closed their car door when Meredith realized that she had been there before.
"Let's go to the Airport!" Derek smiled.
"Oh. I almost forgot about that." She whispered incoherently. He had no clue what she was talking about.
"We could just drive home, postpone DC. Have a lot of sex" Derek suggested while Meredith was flying through the insides of an ambulance in her mind.
"No" she said like she knew what was about to happen.
"Next stop, Washington." Derek smiled and started to turn the car. "Mmm. Paradise here we come."
Why do bad things happen to good people? We ask that question so often, it's become a cliché. But that's because bad things do happen to good people. Constantly. You just have to hope that when it's your turn, you'll know what to do how to cope, how to the truth is you don't know how you'll react to your worst-case scenario -not until it happens.
It was like a scene in a movie. She never saw it coming and then everything happened in slow moting. It was like she was flying through the ambulance again. She heard the blaring horn, she yelled "Derek" and looked at her husband. Tires screeched and there was a loud bang and she blacked out.
