Lunch was now finished and Meredith had to go back up to the patient's room. Katie Bryce's parents had just arrived and they started asking her questions as if she was a proper medical qualified person. She stumbled over her words and ran to find somebody who could talk to them coherently. Within a minute she had found Bailey.
'Katie Bryce's parents have questions, do you talk to them or does Dr. Burke?' she asked.
'No, Dr. Burke is off the case. Katie Bryce belongs to the new attending now. Dr. Shepherd, he's over there.' She pointed across to Derek and bustled past Meredith on her way again. The idea that she would be working with Derek, her husband, her guy, hadn't crossed Meredith's mind. She stood for a minute watching him speak to some other doctors. She watched the light playing with his hair, noted the slight stubble growing on his chin, admired the dent in his nose.
Then she shook her head and marched over to him. He looked at her and smiled and said a quick goodbye to the men he had been talking to. He was about to lean in for a hello kiss but she stood back.
'I'm pretty sure the other interns already know about my mom and I can't have them hating me even more,' she said quickly. 'At work we are strictly professional!'
He laughed his perfect laugh and said, 'Well what do we have anyways?' She told him about Katie Bryce's parents and he left and she sped away in the other direction to go watch the appendectomy George O'Malley was going to scrub in on. He was lucky and everything seemed to be going well and then suddenly, he failed. He cut the wrong cord. She saw his face fall as Burke pushed him away from the table. Some jackass intern started calling the poor guy 007 as in 'licensed to kill'. As if George didn't feel bad enough all ready. You could see it in his doughy little face.
Meredith made her way downstairs to the nurses station only to overhear the jackass who had called George 007 rudely speaking to a nurse and jumping to conclusions about a diagnoses. Then he walked up to her.
'Damn I hate nurses,' he said. 'I'm Alex by the way.' The way he spoke so unnecessarily rudely just ground up her blood. How could he be so disrespectful towards nurses in one second and then act all charming to her in another?
'My name is Meredith. I think you should reconsider what you said about those diagnoses, you could be wrong.'
Just then she got another page for Katie Byrce and had to take off just as George arrived.
'Hey was that Meredith who just left?' he asked.
'Yeah. Hot, right?' Alex said. He stretched his arms.
'Do you know if…if she's seeing anyone?' George said.
'Man how could you miss the size of that ring on her finger?'
George's jaw dropped to the ground. 'She's married?' he said. He turned his head to see her as she was walking away and only now could he make out the shiny glint of gold on her ring finger.
'But…I'm friends with her, you think she would have said something,' George said. 'I mean, kinda friends. Well, not actually friends exactly but we're tight, we hang out. I mean really only just like today but I thought she'd have mentioned something.'
'Dude, just stop talking.'
Meredith arrived at Katie Bryce's room. She had thought it was another fake but as she drew closer to the room she sensed the tense, panicked atmosphere in the room. She stood in the door for a second. Everything seemed to freeze. There was Katie on the bed, seizing, shaking from head to toe and nurses around her and they were all asked some proper doctor name Dr Grey for instructions but it was like they were too separate people. She was just Meredith. How could she save somebody's life? It wasn't possible.
And then Katie's heart stopped and Meredith had to wake up and push her way through the mist in her head. She had to shock her and it was like somebody else was shouting the words coming from her mouth. 'Charge pads to 360!' And then when those stressful seconds were over, when Katie's heart suddenly began pulsing again, Derek arrived. 'What the hell happened in here?' he asked.
'She had a seizure and her heart stopped and-' Meredith began.
'I thought you were supposed to be monitoring her Dr Grey?'
Where did he get off looking so angry? The girl was alive, wasn't she? And he was supposed to be on her side. God she felt drained. She wanted to pass out, to just get away from the guy in Katie's room, get away from the stress and expectations and bitter feelings she was having for her husband. She walked through the hospital corridors in a daze, trying to wrap her head around the whole day. She heard Christina call her name but she ignored her. God she was going to throw up. When she reached the doors of the hospital she began to run and made it a few meters away before she vomited spectacularly under a tree.
'That is disgusting Grey,' Christina wrinkled her nose.
Meredith turned and began walking back inside. Just because you got sick it didn't mean you could take a break, not even for a second.
