IT SEEMED LIKE every morning, Skylar was woken by one of her new roommates. This morning, she was woken by Izzie standing over her bed. She was wearing only a t-shirt with underwear while brushing her teeth.
"Izzie, we have a bathroom for a reason," Skylar said, gesturing to the toothpaste in her mouth.
"George is in the shower," the blonde responded. George and Izzie were the only ones that needed to take a shower that day since Meredith was already up and ready and Skylar took one the night before. Once they were all ready, they jumped into Meredith's blue car once everyone was dressed. During the ride over to the hospital, the girls were telling George that he was on shopping duty. He wasn't overjoyed because that meant he had to buy lady products, which freaked him out a bit.
"You don't understand. Me gonads, you ovaries," a very frustrated George said to the three girls while stepping out of the car. Skylar slightly rolled her eyes at the dramatics, finding amusement that he needed to be seen as a manly man.
"Oh, that reminds me," Izzie reminded him, throwing her hair into a loose bun as the four of them walked toward the hospital entrance. "We're out of tampons."
"Already?" Skylar wondered. "I feel like I just bought them."
"That's what happens when three girls live together," Meredith shrugged.
"Izzie, you're parading through the bathroom in your underwear when I'm naked in the shower," George continued ranting, not realizing what the blonde had asked him to buy.
"Can you add it to your list please?" Izzie asked again.
"What?"
"Tampons."
"To the list, it's your turn," Meredith explained as they walked toward the hospital entrance, the sun not having risen yet.
"I am a man!" He exclaimed, drawing the attention of people walking by.
"Oh, come on, Georgie. Maybe you feel a bit weird with Izzie walking in on your shower, but what's the problem with buying tampons?" Skylar questioned. George had an unamused look on his face.
"I don't buy girl products. I don't want you walking in while I'm showering, and I don't want to see you in your underwear!" He yelled at the girls, who weren't fazed by what he said. They weren't impressed and didn't care that much either.
"It doesn't bother me, okay? Look at me in my underwear, George. Take your time. It's no big deal," Izzie told them, when they entered the hospital, a car alarm beeping in the background. The interns all gathered in the locker room to get dressed and ready for pre-rounds.
"You are the first person they see in the morning. You say please, you say thank you, you apologize for waking them up. You make them feel good about you," Dr. Bailey told them in the locker room as Skylar changed into her scrubs. Bailey glared at Alex, who had just arrived. "Why is that important? Because then they'll tell you what's wrong. Why is that important? Because then you can tell your attending what they need to know during rounds." Skylar closed her locker and pulled her hair back into a low ponytail. "And why is that important? Because if you make your resident look bad, she'll torture you until you beg for your mama. Now get out there, I want pre-rounds by 5:30."
"I better get good patients today. Yesterday, I had two guys with colostomies who needed dressing changes every 15 minutes," Meredith said after Bailey had left.
"Well, I had a guy who insisted on calling me a nurse," Skylar complained.
"I'm gonna be in surgery. Today's my day," Cristina replied while leaning with her back against some of the lockers.
"On what?" Skylar said while putting her blonde hair in a high ponytail. "Is there something that you want to share with the class, Dr. Yang?" She wondered what patients she would have today. She just hoped they were better than the ones she had a couple of days ago. She had to bite her tongue so as not to snap at them.
"Like I'd tell you."
"What do you know?" Meredith questioned, also a bit curious.
"I know that I was here at 4 and you didn't get here 'till 4:30."
"Tell us," Skylar instructed.
"No. I'm not the intern who's screwing an attending," Cristina explained to Meredith while walking out of the locker room together.
"Hey!"
"I am not screw—" The blonde stopped talking when she saw Derek walking by. Cristina had already left and was on her way to Elizabeth Fallon's room. Skylar was stuck with a couple. They talked about breakfast and they were all cute, which made Skylar feel a bit awkward. She loved all the couple-y stuff, she just felt awkward when people did it in front of her and she was the only one in the room. All she knew was that today was going to be a long day.
Later that day, Meredith, George, and Skylar walked down the hospital hallway together.
"There need to be some rules," George complained.
"So, what, we can walk around in our underwear on alternate Tuesdays? Or you can see bras but no panties? Or are we talking Amish rules?" Meredith sarcastically asked.
"If you think you'll get Izzie to cover herself up…" Skylar trailed off.
"The amount of flesh exposed is not the point. You have to do something, it's your house," George said, looking at Meredith. Skylar started walking a bit faster than them, as they trailed behind her.
"It's my mother's house. Do you like Izzie, is that what this is about? Do you have a crush on Izzie?" The blond questioned.
"Izzie? No, Izzie—I don't like Izzie. No—I—she's—she's not the one I'm attracted to," the brunette blurted out.
"Not the one, so there's a one?" Meredith asked while Skylar walked in front of them, without hearing the conversation, as the boy looked toward her with a slight blush.
"O'Malley, Grey, Kepner, get Karev and head down to trauma," Bailey ordered as they approached, assigning them tasks.
Skylar's mouth fell open when she saw the patient that Dr. Shepherd was already examining. "Holy shit," She muttered to herself. The guy was laying down with nails sticking out of the top of his head.
"Those look like—?"
"Nails," Derek finished Meredith's sentence without looking at her. He was checking the patient's eyes with his flashlight. Skylar stepped away from the patient to the x-ray screen to see what was going on inside his head. The man had seven nails in his head.
"I can't see my hands," the man announced, panicking a bit which was natural for someone in his position. What surprised her the most was that he was still conscious. "I can't see…"
"Breathe deeply, George. You won't pass out," Alex murmured to the brunette, seeing his wide-eyed expression.
"Use 4 milligrams of morphine. Titrate up to 10. You know what? I don't want him to move," Derek ordered.
"It's okay. We need you to be very still, Mr…?" Meredith spoke up, trailing off after realizing they didn't know his name.
"Cruz," a nurse filled in the blank. "Jorge Cruz. He tripped and fell down a flight of stairs holding a nail gun," one of the doctors told Meredith.
"Okay, Mr. Cruz, we've got you now, we just can't have you moving, alright?" Skylar said to the patient, making sure not to touch him in case he reacts badly.
"Somehow he managed to miss a blood vessel. That's a minor miracle. Optic nerve's been affected. Numbness on his right side," Derek examined. "What's our immediate concern?"
"Infection," Meredith and Skylar said in unison.
"I'm gonna be pulling these nails out in half an hour. We need a CT."
"CTs are down," the nurse shook her head, informing Derek of what was going on with the machines. "They exchanged them out last night. Computer's crashed, have them back up by one."
"Typical," Derek muttered. "So, what are the options?"
"An MRI?" George suggested.
"No," Derek rolled his eyes.
"Genius," Alex scoffed. "The guy's got seven metal nails in his head, let's put him in a giant magnet."
"You'll want films from three axis points and a c-arm in surgery," Skylar absentmindedly said.
"Excellent," Derek praised Skylar, before looking at the two male interns. "You guys dig up research and find out if this has ever happened before."
"My wife, my wife…"
"She's on the way," one of the doctors told Meredith, who passed the information on to a very freaked-out Jorge. Meredith and Skylar were left with Jorge after Shepherd left the trauma room. They needed to keep him calm and look for changes—which was not a difficult task.
Earlier, the two female interns had asked Jorge a couple of questions and later met his wife, Sona, and did the same with her. Skylar had hoped that everything would turn out alright for Jorge. The neurosurgeon and two interns were in the scrub room, looking out into the operating room. Derek was getting ready for surgery, while the two interns were already done. To pass the time, Shepherd asked them some questions. "Vertiginous or light-headedness?"
"Light-headed. Sometimes he'd have to brace himself to get out of bed," Meredith answered, while Skylar stared at the patient. A sigh escaped her lips as she thought back to the first surgery she had scrubbed in with Shepherd. Skylar had always found the brain interesting. And after learning about it more and more throughout med school, choosing neuro as her specialty later was something that she could see herself doing. Skylar was the kind of girl that mostly thought well in advance for life-changing decisions—like choosing a specialty. She started thinking about that, right after she graduated from Harvard Medical School.
"Could be a million things. Simple orthostasis. What?" Derek asked after he saw her face.
"What made him fall down the stairs with a nail gun?"
"He said he tripped. Just because you hear hoof beats, don't assume zebras."
"Something caused him to lose consciousness and fall down the stairs. That doesn't just happen on a daily basis. He could have a tumor," Skylar agreed with her friend, as they walked out of the scrub room. Some of the nurses helped Derek get his blue surgical gown on and some sterile gloves.
"Look, I have no idea why this guy's still alive, let alone moving and talking. Not a clue. Let's just get him through this before we start digging for something else," Derek said before one of the nurses held the phone to his ear—Alex and George on the other side. He had a conversation with the two before hanging up and finding out that there was nothing helpful with the other cases similar to this one. Meredith and Derek started discussing something while Skylar stood next to the operating table that Jorge laid on.
"She had this thing for red when we met. Red car, red dresses, red hats. Personally, I hated the color. Too obvious, you know? But a couple of years ago, I took her up to the mountains. She was in a red dress, and there was this field of red poppies, I think. And she jumped out of the car and ran into them and started laughing. Laughing at all the red," he told the redhead about his wife. Skylar gave him a small smile while holding his hand. Meredith joined her friend on the opposite side of the table, holding Jorge's other hand. She looked at Derek, who stood at the head of the table.
"As you can see, the patient has shot seven nails directly into the skull without doing significant damage other than the optic nerve, and we may be able to save that. The idea is to remove the nails at exactly the angle they entered. Any wiggle and we risk doing more damage than when they went in," Chief Webber explained to everyone. Cristina entered the gallery to watch the surgery. Lots of people were observing from the deck.
One by one, Derek pulled out the nails with Meredith and Skylar watching his every move. Meredith's eyes wandered over to Derek more than once and sometimes he would glance back. Skylar stayed focused on the patient, but that didn't mean that the secret glances between Meredith and Derek went unnoticed by her.
Early the next morning, George was taking a shower, while Izzie walked in, in her underwear once again, looking for tampons. "I reminded you before you went."
"I forgot when I got there," George lied badly.
"No, no. You are so passive-aggressive," Izzie yelled out and opened the shower door, while he was still in it. She wasn't bothered by the fact that he was naked, while George was. He scrambled to cover all his parts while Izzie yelled at him. "They're just tampons, George. I really need tampons. God!" Meredith entered the bathroom, while Skylar just stood in the doorway, chuckling at the quarrel between the two. "I'm not riding in the same car with him."
"If you're going like that, you're not riding with me," Meredith commented when she saw Izzie in her underwear. "Where are the tampons?"
"He didn't buy them."
"You didn't buy them?"
"Men don't buy tampons," George replied.
"You know what. You are gonna have to get over the man thing, George. We're women! We have vaginas! Get used to it," Izzie screamed before leaving the bathroom to get dressed.
"I am not your sister!"
Skylar was standing at a nurses' station, leaning against it while filling out a chart for one of her patients. Valerie, her friend, was walking around, grabbing things that people needed. The redhead bit into the apple that she brought up from the cafeteria, as she watched Valerie with a smile. Even though some doctors weren't always the nicest to the nurses, Valerie always had a smile on her face. She was the kind of person that rarely got angry or lost her cool. Kind of like Skylar, but Skylar couldn't always put a smile on her face.
Skylar handed the chart back to Valerie with a "Thanks." She proceeded to move toward Jorge's room. She walked through the hallways, went in the elevator, and eventually saw Meredith and Derek walking together in the distance. She wondered what they were talking about, but decided to leave them alone. The two entered the patient's room and Skylar arrived a little bit later. She stood next to Meredith, pretending that she hadn't been late.
"I'd know the answer to that even if I couldn't see," Jorge said to his wife, who had just asked him what the color of the dress she was wearing was. Derek started asking him some questions, like what he had for breakfast before he came to the hospital. "Cheese omelet. And on Sunday. And on Saturday. And on Friday. Sona gets up every morning and makes me a cheese omelet."
"It's the only thing he likes," Sona explained with a shy smile as she held his hand.
"It's the only thing you know how to cook."
"Okay, well, things look good. But I need Jorge to get an MRI this morning to check for residual bleeding. Okay?" Shepherd informed the couple, before leaving the room with the two interns. They went to do an MRI on Jorge and found out that the man had a tumor near the hypothalamus. Derek told the couple about this but told them the bad news as well. He could remove most of the tumor, but not all of it. To get the rest, Jorge would need radiation and chemo. If Jorge did that he had five to ten years.
Jorge wanted that option, but the bad news was that the tumor was located in a part of the brain where memories and personality reside. If Jorge underwent the surgery, it was possible he would lose who he was. As Meredith stood next to Derek—Skylar on his other side—she thought of her mother. What would happen to Jorge if he chose this option and what happened to her mother were very similar. Skylar noticed tears start to appear in her friend's eyes, but chose not to comment on it at that moment
The blonde's eyes wandered over to Sona and she let out a sigh. If he chose the surgery, his wife would lose the man she loved. His wife asked if there was another way. The only other way was with gamma or cyberknife treatment with focus radiation, but it was less evasive. He would only have three to five years left, but he would keep his memories. The three doctors left the room to give the couple some privacy and make a life-changing decision.
"Jorge and Sona want the surgery," Derek told the two interns as he exited the room and closed the door behind him. Skylar's brows raised with surprise. She didn't expect them to choose that. She didn't know what she expected but not that.
"They want to cut it out?" She asked. Meredith looked at the couple through the window in disbelief.
"Yes. It's their decision," he answered and left.
A few moments later, Skylar was sitting on a chair a couple of feet away from Jorge's room. She was reading an article on pediatric surgery when Sona left her husband's room. Skylar only realized this once Meredith called for the woman.
"Sona?" The woman in red approached Meredith. "You need to consider what you'll lose." Not wanting to disrespect her friend, Skylar gave the blonde an odd look, as if urging her to stop, but she didn't say anything. "What good is five years if he doesn't joke about your omelets and he can't remember seeing you in that red dress?"
"It's still five more years."
"You don't understand. He'll be there, but he won't be Jorge. He won't even recognize you," Meredith continued.
"Mer," Skylar muttered, placing a hand on her shoulder, which she shrugged off.
"He won't even recognize you!" The blonde continued.
"This is our business," Sona defended with hostility that was expected in this situation.
"You have no idea what this will do to you."
"Meredith," Skylar said, a bit louder, but it did nothing to calm the blonde.
"Isn't five good years better than ten bad ones?"
"Meredith!" Derek scolded, walking toward them, overhearing the conversation. "What the hell are you doing?"
"She needs to understand," Meredith pleaded.
"I do understand. You think that I'm being selfish, that I don't want to give him up."
"I don't—"
"This is Jorge's decision. And if that means ten bad years for me, fine. I'll give him those years because I will give him whatever he wants." Derek tried to apologize for Meredith's behavior. She was an intern after all. Sona, however, wasn't listening as she still talked to the blonde. "And if he doesn't remember me—if he doesn't remember what we are—he's still my Jorge. And I'll remember for us both." Skylar looked at the woman, but she had to physically look away after a second, she couldn't handle the look on Sona's face. Derek thought that that was enough and led the woman away.
Skylar watched as Meredith's face morphed into an unidentifiable expression, making the redhead's concern for her friend grow even more.
Later that night, Skylar walked into the living room to see Meredith nursing a bottle of tequila alone. Skylar threw off her coat and sat next to her.
"Do you wanna talk about it?" She asked after a few minutes of sitting in silence.
Meredith stared at her for a moment, before heaving a sigh. "Okay, but know that I don't tell people this, and I'm only telling you now because I feel like I can trust you and you won't pity me." Skylar encouragingly smiled at the blonde. Meredith took another sip of tequila before starting. "My mother has early onset Alzheimer's. I'm the only one who can visit her and she won't let me tell anyone. That's why I over reacted." Skylar let out a small "Oh" and slid closer to her friend.
Skylar let the devastating information sink in. "Do you want to be alone?"
"You can stay." Meredith passed her the tequila bottle. The redhead put her arm around her and took a similarly long swig of the alcohol.
"I don't swink that much, so you better appreciate what I'm doing." Both girls laughed as they drank the night away, forgetting their problems for the night. Between sips and giggles and story-telling, only for a moment, they knew everything would be okay.
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