Chapter 35 Everybody Needs Somebody
Meredith arrived at the ER a few minutes later. She was short of breath and saw that she was the only one there except Torres. When Alex, Izzie and Cristina came in Callie shouted "Where have you been? We have multiple MVC'S due any second." Meredith wondered whether Callie was coping with the responsibility of the Chief resident position because it seemed to her that Callie was nervous and distracted.
"We're here, aren't we? We're here." Alex dismissed his superior's question.
Callie didn't know how to respond. She wasn't used to this kind of disrespect and told them to get ready and monitor their interns while they all entered the bay.
The interns blocked the ER doors and Bailey gave Meredith a blank look "Uh, Grey, don't let them just stand here."
"Let's move, people." Meredith shouted.
The first ambulance arrived and Cristina jumped at it to make sure she gets a case, but was disappointed. "Unrestrained driver, DOA at the scene. Just need someone to pronounce him." The ambulance driver told them.
"Oh,crap. Dead guy. Why'd you get me all excited with the sirens? Okay, who wants to see a dead guy?" Cristina told her interns as she turned around and said "Okay, everybody get a good look? Time of death...8:22."
Suddenly the man started to breathe again and everybody turned around.
"Not time of death. This guy is not dead." Cristina said enthusiastically. The ambulance driver was confused. "He was dead." He insisted.
"Well, he's not dead now. Let's bag him. Okay, we've got a...we've got a guy who's risen from the dead over here." Cristina said as she pushed the gurney towards the entrance.
Meredith saw that Lexie was blocking the ER doors so she shouted "Get out of the way, Lexie!" before another ambulance arrived.
The doors opened and Dr. Bailey and Meredith approached the patient. It was a pregnant woman huge belly. "Kathy Walters, 34 years old, 36 weeks pregnant. Complete upper arm amputation. Pressure dressings applied. Two large bore IVs started." The ambulance driver told them and the patient began to stress.
She looked around in shock and wondered desperately "Did he say "arm"? My arm is gone?"
Dr. Bailey took her hand and tried to calm her down "Miss Walters, you're gonna be okay. Grey, check the wound."
Kathy insisted "I really need my arm."
After taking a short look at the wound Meredith told one of her interns to page Sloan and Montgomery while they wheeled the woman into trauma room one. Addison had already started to examine the woman when Mark entered and wondered "What do you got for me?"
Meredith was still unsure about how much Sloan knew about her and Derek, so she tried to sound as professional and emotionally unattached as possible. "Uh, Kathy Walters. Complete amputation."
Addison had finished the exam and told the Meredith "The baby looks fine, but she's having some contractions. I'll tell the nurse what to put into her IV to stop them."
Mark leaned over to the patient and asked her "Hey, Kathy. I'm Dr. Sloan. You mind if I take a look? Hang antibiotics and put on a sterile, moist dressing. There's a chance at a good recovery here. Do we have an arm?"
"They're looking for it" Meredith told him. She knew there was a short window of opportunity and the sooner they would find the arm, the better the chances it could be reattached.
Kathy looked at her in discomforted. She started to cry "My baby has no father. He's already down two arms. So he really needs me to have an arm.
"Get me that arm." Mark shrugged as Meredith left the room to find it.
Meanwhile Lexie entered the other trauma room, where Cristina examined her patient. "Excuse me." Lexie apologized for being late and handed over the x rays she was supposed to get.
"You know, where have you been? I've been waiting for these." Cristina told her harshly.
"I got, um, lost on my way to x-ray 'cause I was all in my head, you know, about..." Lexie started to stammer.
Cristina was amused. Little Grey reminded her of Meredith, who stammered just as much when she was nervous "Meredith... you're her sister?"
Lexie nodded and smiled nervously "Meredith Grey. Lexie Grey. We're half sisters. So you know her?"
Cristina didn't answer because the x ray picture were concerning "Oh, we need to page Dr. Shepherd."She had never seen anything like it.
The interns looked at each other. Nobody had explained to them how to operate the pagers and which codes meant what. "Dr. Shepherd. He...he's the, um...neurosurgeon?" one of them wondered. Cristina got mad and shouted "Okay, somebody page Derek shepherd right freakin' now." Lexie left the room in order to take care of it.
Meredith had been on the phone with every level 1 trauma center in the area, but had not been lucky enough to locate the severed arm when Derek walked up to her. "Thank you. Seattle Grace. Thank you." He heard Meredith talking on the phone. He could tell that she was agitated because she looked up to the ceiling while talking at the phone.
When she hung up, he greeted her. "Hi. How are you?" he wondered. He had not seen her since the night before because she had decided to stay at her place so her room mates wouldn't be too suspicious.
"I have a patient with a severed arm and no one seems to be able to find it. Have you seen it?" she asked unsympathetically.
"Your severed arm? No, I haven't seen a severed arm." Derek smirked and wondered why she was so negatory towards him.
Lexie approached and tried to talk to her sister "Meredith, how...hey, um, I'm...I'm so sorry about before. I just was so nervous about working here and with you. Don't block the ER doors. I know that now. That was a good lesson."
Derek remembered their interview and greeted his sister in law "Nice to see you again"
Lexie turned around and looked at him. She couldn't quite wrap her head around why an attending would greet her like this "Sorry?"
"You're Meredith's sister" Derek said.
"Oh, my god. Yeah. Oh, my god. Yeah." Lexie remembered the interview and began to stammer. "You...call her Meredith."
Derek smirked. "Yeah, I do. It's what husband's do"
Meredith hated the fact that he had pointed that out to her in the hospital. "Yeah, Lexie, this is my wonderful husband. My wonderful husband, this is my half sister, whom you have met before. Found my arm, have to go now." She stormed away to notify Dr. Sloan.
Lexie, who had met Meredith twice before today, was a little sad and surprised "Uh...she hates me. My sister hates me. You are her husband? I mean she told us she had a husband. And she never mentioned your name or your occupation. Hey, uh, you're Dr. Shepherd.
Derek nodded "That's right.""
"I'm...I'm supposed to be finding you for a consult." Lexie told him and brought him into the trauma room with Dr. Yang.
"Back of his skull is completely disconnected from his first cervical vertebrae." Derek looked at the xray in admiration. He hd never seen something like this.
"He's been internally decapitated. Holy crap." Cristina said.
"90% of these die in the field." Derek stated
"And the other 10%?" Lexie who stood in the back with the other interns wondered.
"I've never seen one live." Derek said.
Lexie smiled hopefully "There's always a first time, though, right? I mean, he came back from the dead."
Derek leaned over to the patient " Henry, I'm Dr. Shepherd. The back of your skull is disconnected from your spine. I'm going to try and reconnect it in surgery. Do you understand me? Blink once for yes, twice for no." The patient blinked. Derek used his calming voice to ease the fear "Okay, good. I know it's scary, but I promise you, I'm going to do everything I can. Do you have family? Alright. We're going to contact them, okay? All right, let's get him in a halo."
"Uh-huh." Cristina said as they had left the room.
"Contact his family. Find out if he's an organ donor." Derek told Cristina before he left.
After she had picked up the arm and brought it over to Dr. Sloan, Meredith went back to Kathy's room. "We have the arm, and Dr. Sloan is checking right now to see if we can reattach it. Is there someone we can call?" Meredith calmed her down.
The woman was desperate "There's no...no, I just...I just moved here. I'm all...I'm all by myself. There's no one. I have no one."
Meredith took her hand "Well, Dr. Sloan should be here any minute."
"I wanted a kid and...I was sick of waiting for the right guy, so...in my family...in my family, you don't go out and get pregnant. So now I'm alone and...I'm having a baby, and I don't have a father for the baby, and I don't have an arm." Kathy cried in her arm.
"It's okay. Here's Dr. Sloan." Meredith said when Mark came in. He looked optimistic and was clearly happy to tell the patient good news.
"Kathy...I'm happy to report that your arm is in good shape. Dr. Grey here is gonna clean it up a little, and...and I'm gonna put that arm back where it belongs, okay?"
Meredith was cleaning up Kathy's arm in a preparation room when Cristina walked in and sat down next to her "Still no sign of Burke. Oh, you've got a severed arm."
Meredith got defensive. Cristina had took over her surgeries before and while she was miserable, she didn't want it to happen "My arm. Mine. Get away from it."
"Maybe he's not on today." Cristina wondered.
"Maybe you should just see him and get it over with." Meredith said. She knew Burke wouldn't come back, but she couldn't tell Cristina because Burke had asked Derek to do it.
"No, no, no, no. If I never see him again, I won't care." Cristina said. She couldn't face the possibility.
"Well, I've seen Derek, and Derek has seen me." Meredith said with a smile on her face.
Cristina looked at her and asked "And?"
Meredith raised one of her eyebrows and pretended to be not fine. "Awkward. Don't you have a surgery to get to?"
Cristina caught up with Derek, who waited for the patient's chart at the nurse's station "I talked to the family they're on their way." She said when she arrived at the desk.
"Good. I put an entire OR on hold. We don't have much time." He told her "Uh, do you maybe want to have a drink later?"
"What?" Cristina shrugged. Why would her best friend's cheating husband have the audacity to ask her out for a drink?
"A drink. Give me one reason why we can't hang out." Derek said calm.
"I don't like you." Cristina said firm.
"You don't like me because of Meredith?" Derek wondered.
"I don't like you because you're you." Cristina answered and started to walk away.
Derek knew it was best to play pretend to be able to keep talking to her, so he asked "Hmm. How is Meredith, by the way? Is she okay?"
"She's fine." Cristina said and kept walking.
"She's always fine. That's her problem." Derek shouted.
Cristina turned around and walked towards him "We're fine people. We do fine. We're fine. How's Dr. Burke? I haven't seen him around. Is...is he off today?"
Derek offered her to sit down and sat down on the opposite seat "Here. Dr. Burke handed in his letter of resignation two weeks ago. He wanted me to tell you."
Cristina was taken by surprised. All her secret hopes of reconciliation were shattered. Burke had left. Burke had left and he hadn't even told her in person. "He's gone?
"I'm sorry." Derek said and got back up.
Cristina felt all kinds of emotions at once when she got back to Meredith. She needed someone to talk to. Someone who knew personal problems and trauma better than she did "Oh, severed arm. Plus Mer's half sister is my intern, Izzie is playing Dr. Dolittle, oh, and I hate your husband"
Meredith looked at Cristina. Absolutely nothing she had just heard made any sense to her. "Why?"
"He told me that Burke left. I mean he walks up to me, asks me out for a drink, like freaking hell, why would I go out for a drink with him? And he tells me that Burke left." Cristina started to stammer.
"Oh. And you're okay with it? You are not going to break down?" Meredith asked. She knew Cristina was on the verge of cracking.
"I'm fine." Cristina said "But you seem awfully happy right now."
"That's because I'm fine." Meredith said and tried to replicate Cristina's fake smile.
"I wanna kill him right now" Cristina said aggressively.
"Burke?" Meredith wondered "Might be difficult, he left"
"No Shepherd, he just tells me he left, no sugar coating, nothing, and now he expects me to go into surgery with him" Cristina said.
An intern interrupted them "Dr. Sloan's ready for the arm.
Meredith grabbed the arm and got up, when Cristina grabbed her hand and begged her "Trade surgeries?"
Meredith was hesitant. She didn't want to work with Derek until she would tell Cristina about everything. "Why?"
"I don't want to be with Shepherd and you have a severed arm. Come on, he just told me that Burke is gone for good, I can't look at him right now." Cristina told her.
"And you expect me to scrub in with him?" Meredith asked. Cristina didn't know that Meredith and Derek were back together, so it would be a huge thing to ask for.
"You love neuro and you are not the one that got left at the altar" Cristina told her.
"Yeah, and that fact is what got me into that mess in the first place." Meredith laughed.
"Come on, you're my person" Cristina insisted.
"Fine! Go!" Meredith gave in and looked at the chart.
"His family is waiting in the hall. You should go and find them" Cristina told her before she left.
After studying the chart for a few minutes to familiarize herself with the case, Meredith walked over to the family, who said in the waiting area.
"Your husband's injuries are s-severe. Uh, they're traumatic in the extreme." Meredith tried to explain.
"I'm sorry. What does that mean?" the patient's wife wondered. She looked desperate and confused and Meredith knew it might be the best option to be completely honest.
"The only thing holding his head on to his body is skin and muscle. If he moves even a fraction of an inch, it could kill him." She said and took a deep breath.
The wife looked shocked. She bit her lip and started to stutter "So are you saying that the...
" I'm...I'm saying that when you see him, this could be the last time...this could be the last time you see him alive." Meredith said in a calm determined tone before guiding the family into the room.
"Are you in pain, sweetie? Good. Two blinks...you aren't in pain." His wife asked as she leaned over her husband, who was lying in a hospital bed. She had two little kids with her, who looked scared at the sight of their father. "Why isn't daddy answering?" the little girl wondered. She was scared and Meredith took her hand.
The wife took a deep breath and looked over to her children "Just...right now we just need to wish daddy good luck in his surgery and tell him how much we love him. Okay? Cause we do. I love you so much" She saw that her husband Henry had blinked three times and looked over at Dr. Shepherd and Meredith "What's...what's three blinks?" she wondered.
"Uh, we've only been working with one and two." Derek told her.
"It's I love you" Meredith said.
"Is it "I love you"? Are you telling us you love us? Three blinks is I love you. We're gonna be fine, Henry. You're gonna make it, and we're all gonna be just fine." The wife said with teary eyes and a hopeful smile on her face.
"It's time to go." Derek said as there wasn't too much time until the surgery was scheduled.
"Okay, guys. Let's let these doctors fix daddy up." The wife told her children and the daughter walked over to the bed and blinked three times.
They started to scrub in for the procedure and it was the first time they were able to talk in private since Derek had told Cristina about Burke's departure.
"You told Cristina." Meredith stated the fact.
He nodded and said "I did" and wondered whether she told her about their reconciliation.
Meredith grinned. "She wants to kill you at the minute. We traded surgeries because of it. I can't tell her now or she's going to kill me."
Derek leaned over to her and whispered "I wouldn't want that." He kissed her neck and asked "So how are you?"
"I'm fine and I'm kind of glad that we get to work together, Dr. Shepherd." Meredith said with a huge smile on her face. She knew she had to resist his flirtation "And I'm going to be as professional as I can possibly be. I'm professionally working with my half sister and my officially soon to be ex husband who is really just my husband."
Derek noticed that she was stammering again and saw that Lexie entered the scrub room too. "This stammering thing. Your sister is doing it too. Must be genetic." He whispered in Meredith ear. "Shut up." Meredith said loudly and Lexie looked at the two of them in confusion.
Meredith taught Lexie how to prep the OR for a surgery and what Derek needed for his. She could have asked personal questions, but she limited the interaction to teaching. After they had finished the preparations Derek came in.
"I'm starting the fusion now." He announced after picking up the scalpel.
Lexie observed the patient's body. It was her first day and she got to scrub in with her sister and her brother in law. She was nervous and confused when she noticed a small movement. "Did he just move?" she asked concerned.
Meredith turned her head to his body and noticed the small movements too and confirmed "Oh, he...he definitely moved."
"The anesthesia's light. Grey, stabilize his neck." Derek ordered her. Meredith and Lexie exchanged a quick look because they didn't know whom he was talking to.
"Okay, Lexie, come and grab his feet. Go under the drape and do not contaminate the sterile field." Meredith ordered her sister.
"We need to keep him very still until he is under. We can't risk even the slightest movement." Derek reminded them.
Meredith turned to the patient and hoped it would work. He couldn't leave his children, he couldn't die. "You cannot move. Do you hear me? This is not an option." She said loudly. She took his hand and continued "Everything is not gonna be fine if you move. It will be the opposite of fine. You cannot leave the people you love. They need you. Not just the memory that you love them. You can't leave them." She pated his hand and was glad when the anesthetics finally kicked in.
"You really meant what you said in that OR?" Derek asked Meredith after they had successfully completed the surgery. He looked a little bit concerned because of the way Meredith had begged the patient to stay with them.
Meredith started to speak in a calm voice and focused a point at the other side of the room in order to avoid looking into Derek's eyes. "I did, he has kids. Look at them, beautiful kids. No kid should grow up without its dad. It's horrible. I did it, I mean he's still alive, but he wasn't around so he might have been dead all this time, it wouldn't have made a difference. The other woman who came in the next ambulance. She's having a baby, no dad and she lost her arm. Sloan is trying to reattach it. Makes you wonder if you ever want to have kids, death is all around us. I don't want our kids to grow up with only one parent."
Derek's face lit up "Our kids? You want kids?"
Meredith was taken by surprise. She was surprised about the fact that she had brought it up and about the way Derek reacted. All she could say was "Ugh..."
Derek sensed her anxiety "I mean we never talked about this… "
Meredith was afraid to discuss this because she had never thought about having kids. It was nothing she ever considered to have. "My mother was a horrible mother and I have crappy DNA. We won't talk about this, baby steps, remember?" Derek looked sad and Meredith knew she had been too harsh. They had to take one step after the other. "You can pack your stuff because I'll try to tell Cristina about us this week and you can move in on Friday. We'll see how this goes and we'll cross the baby bridge when we have to."
Derek nodded and got back to the professional side of their relationship asking her "Do you want to talk to the family?
Meredith nodded, turned around and said "I will."
"Scrub into my other surgery in 15 minutes. You know, the one I asked you to scrub in this morning. It got pushed back, but now we have time for it" Derek told her as she left the room.