A dirty blonde haired woman stood at the Nurse's Station. She was busy paging through various patient's charts, trying to figure out if something's changed during the break she had after passing her Resident Exams. She tried to hide it, but the woman was very nervous about the fact that she was going to have four interns to take care of from now on. She secretly worried that she might not be able to do as good of a job as her own resident, Dr Miranda Bailey had done during her own internship. At the time, the newly promoted resident was just planning to repeat the speech she received from her own teacher on her first day in the hospital. She could easily remember it, like it was only yesterday. However, the blonde haired doctor worried if her execution would be good enough to properly scare the crap out of her interns. After all, if you wanted to keep at least a small semblance of control over them, you needed that. What a worrying thought it was. There was nothing scarier than the idea that any mistake her interns make, that would cost the patient his or her life, was on her, she would have to answer for it. At first, she was just planning to leave them be, make sure that they don't get in her way, but then, she remembered what a wise man once said. "You can give a beggar some bread and he won't go hungry for a day, teach him to fish, and he won't go hungry for the rest of his life". With this revelation, she resolved to teach them as thoroughly as she could manage, she resolved to make sure that they don't kill a patient on her watch. To make sure that they properly do their jobs when they pass their internship exams.
At the same time, four green interns in light blue scrubs were quickly approaching the Nurse's Station, where their assigned resident was supposed to be waiting for them. They didn't know her last name, they were just told that it was supposed to be a woman with dirty blond hair, named Meredith, which would be waiting for them at the Nurse's Station.
"Hey, guys, do you think that's her?" asked one of them, a dark haired guy. "She looks similar to the description…"
"Well, it doesn't hurt to ask, does it?" a brunette answered. "Seriously, would it have been that hard to give us a last name? There probably are dozens of Merediths in this hospital. If that's not her, we might be looking for her the whole day or something."
"Yeah, no shit. Anyway, can't win, if you don't try, right?" the guy answered, hesitantly. "Let's go."
The interns hesitantly walked up to the woman. The guy lifted a finger and poked her in the shoulder, praying to god that she wouldn't be one of those people who freak out when others touch them unexpectedly.
"Um… Excuse me, but are you by any chance Dr. Meredith?" he asked when the slightly startled woman turned around. "They didn't give us a last name, just told us to look for a blond haired woman named Meredith near the Nurse's Station. Please, tell me that you're our resident, because it would be awful to look for her the whole day."
The woman was quite surprised. "They only gave you my first name? Odd. Oh, well, I was told to wait here, so you must be mine," she said after thinking for a moment. "Okay, to begin with, I have five rules. Memorize them. Rule number one: don't bother sucking up, because I already hate you and that's not gonna change. Trauma protocol, phone list, pagers," she pointed the items out on the counter. "Nurses will page you. You will answer every page at a run. A run. That's rule number two. Your first shift starts now and lasts thirty six hours. It was fourty eight when I was an intern, but apparently you guys get overworked or something. You're interns, grunts, nobodies, bottom of the surgical food chain. You run labs, write orders, work every second night until you drop and don't complain," she said, while leading the pack on a walkway on the second floor of the hospital. She quickly reached the on-call rooms. "On-call rooms," she said. "Attendings hog them, so sleep when you can, where you can," at this point, the blond resident named Meredith wanted to share some advice from her own experience with attendings and sleeping, but stopped herself. "Which brings us to rule number three. If I'm sleeping, don't wake me unless your patient's actually dying. Rule number four: the dying patient better not better not be dead when I get there. Not only will you've killed someone, you'd have woken me for no good reason. Are we clear?" she said, trying to sound as harsh and cold as she could manage, which, truth be told, wasn't much.
The brunette woman raised her hand. "Yes?" the resident asked.
"You said five rules, but I've only counted four."
"Rule number five," the resident said, irritated. "When I move, you move."
The blonde doctor got ready to move at once, but her traitorous pager remained silent. Well, nobody said it's gonna be easy, huh? she thought to herself, suddenly having doubts if this was the right way to go about things. After all, she thought. I'm not Dr Bailey and these residents aren't George, Izzie, Cristina, Alex, and me. Her doubts were further strengthened when they noticed the expressions on the faces of her interns. Apparently, they didn't get the joke, so to speak. Without a doubt, proper timing was essential to create proper impressions. The silent pager screwed everything up. Well, when plan A fails, start with the plan B. The only problem is, what's the plan B? the inexperienced resident thought to herself. Let's just improvise.
"Okay, people, this was my own resident's Dr Miranda Bailey's speech we got when we started. She's a very intimidating person when she wants to be, so it worked great for us at the time, so I thought it would be nice to repeat it to you too." she said, then coughed, trying to give herself a couple of seconds to think of what to say next. "After all, when The Nazi says that she hates you, one tends to believe her words. Anyway, you should know that this is all new for me, so let's start over, okay?"
Her new interns were doubtfully nodding their heads. Apparently, they weren't too impressed.
"Okay, um… I guess I should start by introducing myself first," she said, nodding her head trying to boost her own confidence up and again provide some time to think of what to tell them next. "Right, my name is Meredith, Dr. Meredith Grey, to be exact, and your asses are mine for your foreseeable future as surgical interns in Seattle Grace Hospital, so to speak," she said, trying to lighten up the atmosphere. She didn't notice how the brunette intern who spoke up earlier gasped. "I remember how I was when I started my internship. Yes, this is the time when you listen to the old fart reminiscing about the good old days. Thought I knew everything, wanted to do surgeries right away… The Chief's speech about you being taught by doctors and being the doctors didn't help much too," she said slowly, letting her new students think about it. "I am sure that you feel the same way, right?"
Her new interns were nodding their heads affirmatively, apparently thinking that she was going to give the scalpels and throw them into the action.
"I think I said it best after getting out of the OR after my first shift. Here goes," she said, trying to sound all mysterious and wizened. "You practice on cadavers, you observe, and you think you're gonna know what you're going to feel like standing over that table, but it's such a high! I didn't know why anyone would do drugs. At least that's how I felt at the end of my first forty eight hours long shift, after getting to scrub in on a neuro surgery," she said from the bottom of her heart, trying to make them understand what she meant. "But you have to keep in mind that it's not that simple. Want to know how I realized that?"
The interns nodded their heads again, finally starting to actually listen to what she had to say. Hey, maybe it's not that bad, Meredith thought.
"On my first day they brought this beauty pageant contestant. She had seizures, nobody could figure out what was wrong with her. Let's just say that me and my friend Cristina, who is a resident at Seattle Grace too, by the way, figured it out somehow and I got to scrub in on the surgery. I didn't get to do anything really, I just observed, but it still was awesome. Now, there also was another intern. The attending decided to have fun and made him do an appendectomy. He choked on the hardest part of the procedure and was known as 007 for a long time after it. Do you think it was a high for him? Did he wonder why anyone would do drugs? No, he didn't. He was worried if he would be allowed to stay in the program at all. I wasn't any better than him that day. Do you understand what I am trying to say?"
The interns looked clueless. "Think about it this way. The girl was sick. My and my intern friend found the cause. I was chosen to scrub in, but only got to look through a microscope, while Dr. Shepherd worked. Was it worth it? Yes. What would I have done if Dr Shepherd asked me to cut? She would have probably died, because I was nowhere near good enough at the time. George had a sick patient who needed an appendectomy. He had to perform the procedure. He choked at the hardest part, Dr. Burke took over and everything ended okay for the patient. It wasn't awesome for him. Do you see now?" Dr. Grey asked.
"It doesn't matter who gets to cut if the patient lives?" the brunette answered tentatively, while trying to hide from the sight of her resident.
"Exactly! You might think that there is no surgery you couldn't do, but that's not true yet. I'm sure that all of you are great doctors, but you need real life experience. You need to see a lot of things before you can be trusted with a scalpel in an OR. You might not like it, but that's the truth. The hospital is different from the med school. Nobody cares what your grades were, who your parents are or any of that crap. The only important thing is that your patient lives. The pecking order is here for a reason. It saves lives. Do you understand what I mean?"
The interns were nodding again.
"Great, now I know that rivalry is needed to get better, I know that the Chief talked a lot about "the game" but please, if you don't want to do scut until you get gray highlights in your hair, there won't be any crap dramas between you. If you want to be the best, learn from each other, if you learn how to do some new fancy stitch, teach it to the others, they will teach you something else too. As long as you are my interns, put the life and wellbeing of the patient first. If the patient dies, it doesn't matter who came ahead. Don't get me wrong, rivalry is good for your skill, it helps you improve faster, but if it clouds everything else, it makes you forget your true purpose. To heal. You are healers first!" The interns were listening attentively. Finally got through to them, Grey thought.
"As your teacher, my duty is to… umm… teach you. That means that unless we are in a really big hurry, I will expect you to analyse and discuss lab results, CT scans, x-rays and all that. If you don't understand something or don't know how to do something, you're more than welcome to ask. If you want to learn something, ask and I will try to provide you with the means to learn it with. If you have any concerns, come to me. However, if you had a question and I answered it, make sure to remember what I said, so I don't have to repeat myself. If a patient dies on your watch, stuff happens, everyone kills someone, that's unavoidable. However, don't make the same mistake twice. Think over all of your actions, decisions, figure out what you could have done differently. Learn from your failures. There are times where you couldn't have really done anything to prevent a death even if you was the best there is. Shit happens, luck is a bitch, the most unlikely series of events possible can happen," she said. Should I or should I not? Meredith wondered to herself. Ah, to hell with it, it's for their education.
"As an example, a woman, of whom I was very fond of, my stepmother, to be exact," she started, gathering her courage. Meredith didn't notice the brunette gasp in surprise and retreat behind the others. "Was admitted with a case of hiccups. The best doctors in this hospital were taking care of her. We tried the least invasive procedures. In a series of complications, the patient died. I went over the sequence of events hundreds of times in my head but couldn't figure out what should have been done differently. The probability of each of the complications happening was around 1%. It was horrible. As doctors, you will have to learn to deal with these kind of things, where you can't do anything. You just have to live on, don't forget to practice your skills on dummies or cadavers," the brunette looked terrible, but no one noticed. "You might not get to do real surgeries for quite a long time, so you should try to improve your skill by other means if you have a spare moment. If you don't know something, ask me. In fact, I might try to find some time each day to stay an hour or two longer to teach you guys anything you need help on in the Surgical skills lab. The better you are the more surgeries you will get to participate in. Keep in mind, that it's not really the point. The most important thing is this: the better you are, the more lives you will save. Remember that. Surgeons often get god complexes. That's actually fine. Some of our surgeons are referred to as cardio-gods, neuro-gods, plastics-gods and so on. They are not, however, gods. Shit happens. Shit happens to my stepmother. She is dead. She was becoming like a mother to me, and she died of hiccups. Shit happens. Learn from it. Never forget that it's a human life you have in your hands when you work. Never forget that," she stopped to take a breath from the long speech. " Okay, I'm sure you are bored like hell, so that's it for now. We're assigned in the ER today, if I recall correctly, so let's go."
She started walking towards the ER. The strangely teary eyed brunette from earlier was about to come up to her, when Dr Grey remembered something. "Shoot, forgot something. Wait up. I introduced myself but forgot to as anything about you," she said, while looking at her new interns, specifically the sad-looking one brunette. "You, in the back, first. What's your name, Dr.?"
The brunette looked like a deer in the headlights. "Alexandra, Dr. Grey. I am Alexandra Grey, but people call me Lexie. Your sister. It was my mom you were talking about," she said, while trying to stop the oncoming sobs.
Meredith Grey was stunned. There was only one thing one could say at a moment like this. "Oh. Shit."
AN – First of all, none of this is mine. Second of all, this is just a one shot for now, to see if there's any interest in a novel length story. It would be a piece where Meredith takes the education of her interns seriously, takes care of them, gradually warms up to Lexie and so on. It would be quite similar to the original seasons 4 and 5 of Grey's Anatomy, just with an emphasis on intern education. Romance would not be the most important thing in the story, however there can't be no romance in Grey's, can it?