Okay, here it goes – my first Grey's Anatomy Fanfic. Now, in my defense, my screenname has been Gray longer than Meredith Grey has been a character on this wildly popular TV show, and I am not in any way trying to associate myself with that family, because from what I've seen of season five (and that's the only season I have watched) they have a lot of drama I really don't have time for. Plus we spell it differently. End of discussion.
This story takes place after episode 5.08 "These Ties That Bind", when Christina gets roped into the solo surgery on the basis of teaching she didn't actually do. I decided several episodes ago that the residents at Seattle Grace needed a wake-up call on the subject of teaching, and so this fanfic was born.
From the surgery center at Seattle Grace hospital, this is Mercury Gray, bringing all you GA fans in the house a lesson in The Small Matter of Teaching.
"Everyone, I'd like you to meet Dana Langley," Chief Webber began, looking around at the room filled with residents and interns alike. "She is thirty one years old, and was admitted two days ago after suffering a fainting fit in the middle of a lesson at Public School Ninety-Seven, where she works as an English teacher."
At the mention of their patient's profession there were murmurs amongst the crowd of interns.
"I promise, I won't check over your charts to make sure you've spelled everything correctly," the woman sitting on the bed joked to the room full of doctors. There were a few chuckles.
"I think you'll find, Ms. Langley, that many of us lived in fear of our English teachers in favor of our science professors," the chief quipped. Again, there were few laughs. Webber went on regardless. "When she was admitted, Ms. Langley was given an MRI to see if the problem was neurological, and, since nothing out of the ordinary was found there, a stress test was administered to see if perhaps some on-the-job anxiety was involved – and I'm sure your job is full of it with a room full of thirty high schoolers all day long," Webber said to the younger woman, who nodded with a knowing smile.
"After suffering another fainting fit on the treadmill, it was determined that the problem was circulatory -- that her aortic valve is not closing properly, causing some regurgitation of blood back into the left ventricle and making the heart pump harder than usual to get the blood out where it needs to go. Tomorrow we will be replacing her valve with an artificial one; a relatively simple surgery, and one which Doctor Christina Yang, one of our residents and our most promising cardiothoracic surgeon, will be assisting me on," Chief Webber explained to the patient.
"I don't speak scientist, Doctor Webber, but it all sounds in order. Let's put in a new valve," the English teacher said with a confident smile.
"Now because of the nature of degenerative heart diseases of this kind, we're going to need fresh images from today to correctly assess the situation and deliver a plan of action, so I am going to turn you, Ms. Langley, over to Doctor Yang, who will take you down to radiology for a new echo and a chest x-ray," the Chief explained. Ms. Langley nodded, smiling at Doctor Yang and the interns.
"Glad to be of service to your education," she said brightly. Christina gave an abbreviated smile and took the chart from Chief Webber, waiting until he had left the room to continue perusing it.
The room was strangely silent for a moment until Christina glanced up from the chart at her four very confused interns. "Well, what are you waiting for? Someone call for a chair and get her down to radiology!" she barked, dismissing the interns like a flock of confused chickens and going back to the chart, completely ignoring her patient, who, it should be noted, was frowning in confusion.
The interns came back with the chair, helping Dana out of her bed and into the wheelchair, pushing her down to radiology while Christina, still absorbed in the chart, continued to ignore them.
"Aren't you going to tell us anything else about the patient?" Number Four point Two asked as Christina continued to peruse the chart from the comfort of the only stool in the control room of X-Ray Room Two. Christina looked at her intern with disgust.
"Can't any of you read a chart on your own? You can have the patient's notes when I'm done with them, and since I'm the one scrubbing in on this surgery and assisting the chief, I have precedence with the chart," Yang explained, rolling her eyes and looking back at the radiology room, where the technician was changing films for another shot of Dana Langley's torso. "And the films!" she announced before going back to her chart. "I get first dibs on the films, too. The rest of you will just have to wait."
"Is this really a teaching hospital?" Dana asked, her voice just a little skeptical as Christina settled her back into her hospital bed, shooing the interns out of the way to give her space to work. The four younger doctors retreated out of the room, holding a conference out in the hall while their chief checked and rechecked pulse and blood pressure monitors, making sure the IV was still securely in Dana's arm.
"The last time I checked, yeah. Why do you ask?"
"Because I was wheeled all over this wing this morning with five people following me around and I didn't see any teaching going on," the patient observed blatantly. "And now I see the students out in the hall and their professor in here."
Christina looked at her patient, surprised. "Oh, there was plenty of teaching. They learn best by seeing," the resident assured her, glancing at the interns and shooting the mutinous bunch in the hallway her best evil look. The mutiny subsided considerably.
"Not everyone learns that way, Doctor. Some people learn by doing, some by hearing the steps and some by reading the steps or writing them down. You're obviously a kinetic learner -- one who learns by doing. It's not surprising that most of your surgeons look like they're kinetic learners, too. You're supposed to be teaching them, Doctor Yang, not snatching away their learning opportunities for your own gain," she continued.
"I'm not sure I like that comment," Christina said icily, but the English teacher went on, undeterred.
"If you were to go up to any doctor in this hospital and asked them who the attending physician was at their own births none of them would know. But if you asked them the name of one teacher who made an impact on their lives they'd all be able to come up with one name, if not several. Great teachers are the ones that stick with you for the rest of your life, the people who give you answers to questions you haven't even asked yet and keep giving those answers long after you've moved out of their class. Being a great surgeon is one thing, but being a great teacher? That's a great thing, too. And you can do both at the same time, you know. I always found I learned something the best when I explained it to someone else."
"Do you want the best medical care possible, Ms. Langley?" Christina asked, point-blank. She hadn't attended a lecture in more than two years, and she really didn't want to break that streak now with some high school English teacher with some sort of saint complex. "Because if you do, you'll want me to be in here, not my interns."
"You know I had a choice of hospitals on this surgery, Doctor Yang," Dana said stubbornly. "I could have transferred to Mercy West, Ballard, or half a dozen others. It's a simple procedure – I've done my homework on it. And I chose to stay here, Doctor, because it was a teaching hospital, and I wanted someone to learn something from my illness. Now please allow your interns to come with you the next time you come and see me, or I will ask for my case to be transferred to another doctor who takes their role as a teacher seriously," the teacher finished resolutely.
Christina looked at the woman and marked something else down on her chart before turning on her heel and leaving. She wanted to talk to Meredith and she wanted to talk to her now, because this was getting to be too much.
Unfortunately, Meredith Grey was nowhere to be found by an anxious and pissed-off best friend who needed to talk to someone -- anyone, really! -- about her mouthy, bossy patient.
"God, is it so hard for someone to answer their pager?" Christina asked, pushing the "Repeat Call" button again with a vengeance and sighing heavily.
"Trying to save the world one page at a time there, Yang?" Dr. Owen Hunt asked genially, pausing by the nurse's station to drop off the chart he was looking at and retrieve another.
"I just need Meredith to answer her goddamn pager," Christina snapped, not looking up at the head of trauma surgery and still staring angrily at her pager, which was still flashing the "Not Answered" signal at her.
"Do you need her medical opinion on something?" Owen asked carefully.
"No, I need her personal opinion on something," the resident answered. "One of my patients is..." She threw up her hands and gritted her teeth, lost for words to describe the interfering English teacher.
"Well, since it seems possible that Dr. Grey is currently unavailable, and it does pertain to a patient, I might be able to help," Hunt offered. "Care to elaborate?"
Christina sighed, rolled her eyes, and shoved her pager back in her pocket. "Fine. My aortic valve patient-- "
"Who has a name," Owen reminded. Christina, flattened, sighed again and went on.
"My aortic valve patient -- Dana," she added angrily for Owen's benefit, "has decided to lecture me on what my role in this hospital is, and is insisting that unless I bring my interns with me and use her as a teaching tool she is going to ask that her case be transferred to another resident."
"Good for her," Owen pronounced. Christina stared.
"Are you out of your mind? She's an English teacher, not a doctor. She doesn't know what's best for her as far as her treatment goes," Christina defended, sputtering out excuses in a hasty attempt to save face.
"Did you consider the possibility that she's right?" Owen asked reasonably. Christina looked at him as though he'd just suggested she do something illegal, unethical, or possibly both.
"What?" she asked sharply.
"I said, did you consider the possibility that she's right about what she said about your teaching? Because it seems to me that you wouldn't be this angry if you didn't at least think some of it was true," the head of trauma surgery pointed out.
"I don't know what you're talking about," Christina deflected, turning away from Owen and trying to make a show of disinterest. It didn't work on Owen.
"You're used to being the best at everything, Yang, and being told that you're bad at something hurts you, especially when fixing the thing you're bad at means giving up prestige and respect in another area you're very good at right now. Now your valve-replacement English teacher does have a very good point -- you are at this hospital to learn as well as teach, and from what I have seen here, she is right about your lack of teaching skills. Maybe you could learn something from her at the same time you fix her heart," Dr. Hunt suggested, taking his chart and heading off in the direction of the ER.
Christina blustered for a moment, sincerely wanting to throw something at the retreating head of trauma and instead settled for a mumbled assertion – "Arrogant bastard!" – before stalking off to try once more to find Meredith.
"And then he had the nerve to tell me –ME! – that the reason I was getting so …uppity about this was because that I knew she was right about my teaching and I can't stand it when people tell me I'm bad at something," Christina summarized. She'd finally found Meredith in the locker room and was pouring her heart out – again – about both Dana Langley and Owen's reaction to her first outburst.
"And then you came to find me to have me tell you something different," Meredith added, trying to make more sense of the situation.
"Exactly," Christina nodded, anxious and ready for this whole nightmare to be over. Meredith would say a few words, reaffirm her belief in her superiority over valve-transplant woman, and that would be the end of it.
"He's right," Doctor Grey said with a shrug. Christina's dreams of reaffirmation fell to the floor along with her jaw. "We are all terrible teachers. I mean, look at Lexie – she's got stitches in her arm because they were practicing sutures the other day! They shouldn't need to do that on themselves, and we're the ones at fault for that. Your valve transplant is right – she's reaffirming what the interns have known for months. She's just the first person bold enough to tell you to your face."
"Incredible," Christina complained. "My own best friend!"
"Hey, it's the truth," Meredith said with a shrug. "If you can't take that, what can you take? And she's offering you a chance to get better. Think of what you could learn from this woman! She deals with high schoolers for a living, teaching a subject I know I hated in high school. I'm sure she thinks you've got it easy – four full time students who all have doctorates already. So give the woman a break, Chris – she might surprise you."
"I thought I said –" Dana Langley began as Christina entered the room, leaving the interns once more at the door and shutting it with a resolute snap.
"I know what you said, Ms. Langley, but I wanted to talk with you alone first," Christina said matter-of-factly, checking vitals for what seemed like the umpteenth time today.
"Okay, go," Dana said, sitting back and studying the doctor.
Yang thought about this for a moment, wondering what to ask first. "How can you tell they're kinetic learners?" Christina asked, slightly interested and more than slightly annoyed that she was actually going along with this crazy advice.
"When you checked my IV this morning, the interns behind you were going through the motions with their own hands," Dana said. "They have kinetic memory -- they learn best when their fingers feel things."
"I'll try and remember that," Christina said, brushing the comment aside to check the IV levels and the patient's pulse. This was so awkward – why was she even trying this?
"And you would know that, Doctor, if you looked at them more often," Dana went on. "A teacher never loses eye contact with her students. If I took my eyes off my high schoolers they'd never learn anything. You're supposed to have a conversation with your students, Doctor, not just lecture them. It's a way for you to understand whether they get it or not. I've been listening all morning, and I can see that you have no problem explaining things, but your patience is the thing getting in the way. Not everyone is going to be on the same level as you," the teacher said with a wry chuckle. There was a pause."We're more alike than you think, you know," she added, watching Christina with expectant eyes.
Christina looked at her patient again, this time locking eyes with the other woman. "Yeah?" she said, her voice short but her tone interested.
Dana readjusted herself on her pillows and smiled. "I was in a gifted and talented program since the third grade. My entire educational career was spent with the best and brightest. I tried moving down to regular English in eighth grade, and I was so bored in the class they were able to move me back up to honors English even though my grades weren't very good. I was miles ahead of everyone else when it came to words, to putting them together. Now I teach in an inner city school that can't even get funding for new textbooks every twenty years, let alone a gifted and talented program. Most of my students read and write well below grade-level. They are not like me. But I am still bound and determined to be the best damn English teacher in Seattle even if none of them will care. And you know what? They still love my class -- because I am patient with them. I have to be."
"We are nothing alike," Christina finally declared. Meredith's well meaning suggestion had worn off – pissed off Christina was back with the same blown fuse in the patience transmitter. "I was not in the gifted and talented program in elementary school. I got where I am because I worked my ass off. School was not easy for me, because for the longest time, I couldn't read and write at grade level, and I had a lot of teachers who wrote me off because of that. I have dyslexia, Ms. Langley, so I wasn't exactly the star student you were. I was so sick of kids making fun of me for not being able to read I poured my heart and soul into studying so that when I finished school, I'd be better than all the kids that laughed me through grade school. And now I am. So forgive me if I don't take your well-meaning criticism the way it's meant, because I really don't have time for it," she finished with a vindicating bite in her voice.
"The gifted and talented part wasn't what I was getting at. I was saying how we like to be the best at things. The fact that you're dyslexic never entered into my comparison."
Christina' s mental victory parade came to a screeching halt. "Wait…you already knew…"
"About the dyslexia? I'm an English teacher, Doctor Yang. I know what overcompensation while struggling through reading looks like," Dana said with a well-meaning smile.
"Oh," Christina said, visibly deflated. She glanced at the bedside table, which, like many bedside tables, was filled with cards and a vase of flowers. "Are these from your students?" she asked, pointing to the cards, trying to defuse the awkward situation.
"The flowers are from my mother, who can't be here. Most of the cards are from my family -- the one with the birds, that was my aunt, and the card with the stick-figure on the front with one too many fingers, that was drawn by my niece. The extra finger is supposed to be a pencil, or so she tells me over
the phone. She was very proud of that," Dana explained. "My college roommate sent me the finger painting -- it was one of her daughter's; she made it especially for me and signed her name on the bottom, too, which is a big accomplishment for her. The oversize piece of cardstock underneath all of that with the million and one signatures inside is from my students."
Christina excavated the cardstock from the pile and read the verse pasted into the middle.
"Roses are red, Violets are blue -- But we can't learn more about poetry without help from you. Get better soon, Ms. L!" The paper was littered, front and back, with haphazardly thrown-together sentiments relating to getting better and getting back to teaching, including several entreaties that the sub wasn't as interesting as Ms. G and couldn't she let up on the homework, as she was in the hospital and they didn't want the stress of grading all those papers to interfere with her recovery. Christina laughed at that one.
"Yeah, they're a smart bunch," Dana remarked. "They keep me on my toes. To tell you the truth, I'm getting a little on edge, sitting here all day. Lord only knows what that sub is doing to my lesson plans. You can only put so much knowledge on paper -- so much of it is up here, in experience," she said, tapping the side of her temple. "That's the real part of teaching – sharing your experience in a way that makes them understand it better. You don't lose face doing that," she explained. Christina nodded. She knew about that.
"Well, we'll have to make sure we get you out of surgery and back to those students, then, won't we?" she said. Dana smiled.
"Indeed we will. Now, do you want to call those interns of yours back in and show them what's up and what's down on my X-Rays or what?"
Christina smiled. "Let's do that," she said, putting her best blustery face back on and summoning the interns back inside the room with an imperious wave of her hand. "Interns, today I will be teaching you how to read an x-ray," she said, taking up a position near the lightbox on the wall and placing the chest x-ray up on the screen. There were surprised stares. "Don't get too excited, because I already knew how to do this before I came to do my internship," Christina went on in her typical blustery fashion.
Eye Contact! Dana mouthed over the shoulders of the interested interns. Christina nodded once and then tried to find her train of thought again. "So, we have our x-ray, and as you can see from the ribs, here, the heart is sitting here, in the upper chest cavity. The aorta, as you know, leads out of the left ventricle and up, where it divides into the three main veins. The problem is in the valve, here. If we look at her echo, we can see the poor flow of blood out of the heart…"
"Where are we seeing this?" Lexie asked, ten steps ahead of the other interns as usual. Christina sighed heavily and rolled her eyes until Dana, giving her a stern look, redirected her back to the light box, mouthing "Use the pictures!"
"If we look at this first picture, here, we see the blood going out, and the valve is open, but if we look in this next picture, we see the valve hasn't closed all the way – do you see the little opening?"
And so the lesson went on, as the interns learned how to interpret an x-ray, and the teacher, in her turn, learned about the small, pressing matter of teaching.
Well, what did everyone think? I'm not a medical student – in fact, I'm about the farthest thing from a med student. I'm an English major minoring in secondary education! But we write what we know, don't we, and I know teaching.
So, again – what did everyone think?