Derek tells Jason he can remove his inoperable tumour and save his life
"Where you going?" Meredith murmured as her eyes crept open to find her husband sat beside the bed, slipping a t-shirt on.
He collected his belt off of the bedside cabinet, threading it through the loops in his pants. "I'm getting the kids up."
"Not time yet." She groaned, turning round to look at the clock. He couldn't see it, considering that she now facing the other way, but she raised her eyebrows as her eyes settled on the time. He was right. It was time to get the kids up. "Or not. Apparently."
"Precisely-" He started as he pushed himself round to her side of the bed. "-why I am going to wake the kids up now."
His hand settled against her arm before he leant into her to place a kiss on her lips. She took it thankfully, smiling.
"I'll go, you can-"
"No." He said, shaking his head. "You are going to rest until forty-five past."
She sat up a little. "No, I'm not. I've got kids to get ready."
He shook his head again. "I'm going to get them changed and downstairs and serve them breakfast. Then you'll come down to some pancakes while I take the kids back upstairs to brush their teeth."
"Really?"
"Yes, really." He confirmed.
She frowned. "You okay?"
His eyebrows creased, confused. He had been smiling; what evidence was he giving her that he wasn't? "Yeah. I'm fine. Good, even."
"You sure you're not just doing the whole let's-do-lots-of-things-to-keep-our-mind-occupied-so-we-don't-have-to-think-about-the-potentially-life-changing-consult-today thing?"
"Jason's scans are going to be fine. I've read every book in existence on diffuse astrocytomas. It's the for-the-first-time-in-like-seven-months-I-get-to-go-and-wake-up-my-kids feeling which is why I'm getting up so early."
"You sure?"
"A hundred percent sure." He confirmed as he pulled himself away from her before leaving the room.
Zola's door was first in the hallway, so was his first stop. "Hey Zo." He greeted as he creaked open the door to find his daughter already awake, sat on the edge of her bed, looking through a book.
"Dada!" She exclaimed, closing the book and running up to him. He had to wait for her to stop in front of him for him to be able to pick her up, but he did so after just a second, her bare feet balancing against his thighs as he released her from the embrace. He didn't realize how good an early morning hug was until that moment. "What ya doing up there Zola?"
"Dada has good hair." She giggled, placing a hand in his waved hair as her tiny feet remained on him so she could reach his head. "Not likes my hair. But good hair."
"What were you reading?" He asked, looking to the book on her bed, too far away to read the title.
She continued to brush her hand through his hair. "Just looking at pictures. Big words in that book. Scary words."
"It is nine plus" He agreed, smiling at his daughter as he settled back on his lap.
"I six. That's like nine. But the other way." She responded.
"Mmm mmm, but I think this six-year-old should go and get changed so I can wake up her brother."
"Ohh! Bails!" She exclaimed, sliding off his lap and running out of the room.
He followed her down the hallway to his son's room with a smile. He couldn't help it; he couldn't believe that he had just got out of bed, then greeted his children in their own bedrooms. To anyone else, that would have seemed silly, but it wasn't to him.
"Bro! Bro! Bro! Bro! Bro!" She exclaimed, shaking him awake. "Wakey wakey!"
"Go way Zozo." He moaned at his sister's shout.
"Leave your brother alone." He instructed. He remembered hating nothing more than his sisters waking him up in the morning, as they did frequently as children. They especially liked doing it when he was a teenager and the majority of his sisters were still children and had all the energy in the world. That was the real problem with such a wide age gap.
"You wakey me up?" He questioned as he sat up, flinging his covers off at the sound of his dad. He hadn't woken him up in eight months (although, technically, it was Zola who actually brought him back from sleep).
"I wakey you up every day from now on." Derek confirmed, beaming at him.
He grinned. "That mean you play if we wake up soon enough too?"
"Well, I'd say we have ten minutes before breakfast-" He said, picking up a plastic dinosaur from the floor and quickly placing it between his fingers so he could just about move with it in his hand. "You wanna play?"
For a second, she was confused about why her hand was suddenly being strangled by his. Then she looked up, the door infront of her catching her eye before she could turn around to look at her husband.
A man in a dark blue three-piece stood with a broad grin on his face, looking at the pair. "Derek Shepherd."
Meredith released his hand to stand. "Yes."
He glanced between them for a second, before stepping back into the room a little. "Come in."
She smiled back at the man, before turning to her husband. It took him a second to process what the man had said and the fact that his wife was now staring at him, then moved his hands to release his breaks.
She let him in first, then followed and closed the door behind them.
"Do you want me to-" He started, settling a hand on one of the chairs in front of the desk.
"Yeah. Thank you." Meredith agreed instantaneously, knowing Derek wouldn't want to reply. He didn't want to come to this appointment. Ever.
"No problem." He said as he lifted the chair and moved it away from the desk before settling there himself.
It took Derek a second to let himself take that empty space, but it gave the man time to settle opposite the desk.
"So. I've read your e-mail. Obviously, from the fact that you're here now, I'd be happy to represent you."
"Okay. Thanks. That's great." Meredith agreed, looking at Derek in the hope that he would be glad about that. Of course, he wasn't.
"So…"
Derek swallowed at the two sets of eyes on him. "You want me to say something?"
"It's okay if you feel uncomfortable. No one like trials or courts. Do you have any…questions that would make you more comfortable?"
"How much?" He breathed, biting his lip.
"Pardon?"
"How much would I…take? If I won." He asked timidly. He wasn't asking because he was greedy or materialistic. He was the opposite. He lived in a tiny, tiny box until he needed a big enough house for his wife and kids. He just needed to know.
"Right, okay, finance, right into it. First thing is medical bills. Do you have an estimate-"
"Right now...It's uh- about 500." Meredith interrupted before he finished the sentence and made her husband even more uncomfortable.
He nodded. That wasn't unusual, considering the obvious state of him. The accident was about five months ago; if he had just a broken leg, he'd be in better shape than what he could see in front of him. "Long-term?"
"There's uh- physiotherapy. Occupational. Actual therapy-therapy. He's uh- he'll need a few more scans in the future, possibly more surgery." She explained, feeling his hand clench again.
"Okay. I'd also factor in how much you would have been paid in the that time. In…well, into the future as well. A difficult question but- do you know when or if a return to work is possible?"
The pair exchanged a look. One that told him that was a bad question to ask.
"Okay, so significant loss of earnings and livelihood then?" He concluded from the couple's exchange.
Derek nodded slowly.
"There's something called PSLA. It's-"
"We know what it is." Meredith cut him off. The plane crash taught her far too much about law.
"You've had a court case before?" He asked, confused. "Can I ask about that?"
"Derek suffered an injury to his hand. I just…I had some minor injuries. Some psychological trauma too, admittedly. We got uh- fifteen."
"Thousand?"
She swallowed. "Million...each."
"This was for a-" He prompted, shoving his surprise down as quickly as possible.
"Mechanical fault in a plane." She elaborated simply. "It crashed. Two people out of six died."
"I'm so sorry."
"Mmm. Just uh- let's go back to the PSLA thing. Pain. Suffering. Loss of amenity. That's what it stands for, right?"
"Yes. That's right."
"Psychologically, would you say it has affected you?"
He shrugged.
That was a lie. All three of them knew it was a lie, and the lawyer didn't even know much about Derek or the accident. It was just an obvious answer.
"Derek has dissociative amnesia." Meredith said, rather abruptly.
"Okay, that-"
"-complicates things a lot." She finished when he ran out of words to finish that sentence. "So his injuries cause the most…pain- psychologically. But…not knowing what happened does still impact him, I think."
"Panic attacks?" He asked, making it clear that he wanted to talk to his subject, not his wife.
"A few." Derek muttered.
"Nightmares?"
"Mmm."
"Fear? Of…anything linked with the accident?"
"He freaked out when I took him home. Then on the way to the hospital and back for…a week or two. He uh- he's fine now though. But yeah. Cars." Meredith explained after a rather long pause. Derek wasn't going to speak, she knew that.
"The judge will base some of the compensation off of your injuries directly. What would you say your worse injuries are?"
"I'm paraplegic. I smashed my skull open and that caused a brain bleed. And, if I didn't break my spine, I don't think I'd be able to walk properly anyway because of the damage to my left leg." He answered, surprising both of them. He swallowed. "So...so what does that mean?"
"Uh- minimum? I'd say…uh- about 1.5 for that. Then we'd need an accurate sum of medical bills for me to work out the rest."
Derek swallowed. "Right. And if it's found to be my fault?"
"It wasn't-" Meredith tried, turning away from the lawyer.
"But he didn't purposefully hit me, did he? He's not a psychopath."
"There may be other factors involved. I'm aware of the missing toxicology report, but there may be some evidence that comes to light about substance abuse or-"
"What happens if we were both wrong? Or neither? Or...something? Who pays my medical bills then? Or...or damages?"
"Derek, non-fault accidents on both sides are so, so rare."
"But...but if it was? What happens then?"
"It isn't."
"But if it was?"
"So...uh, what are they like?"
Derek finally managed to pull his eyes away from the scans to look at the man. "I think your chemotherapy and radiation treatments are working very well. It's helped, it's definitely helped...but it's not got the tumour to the stage where I could deem it operable."
He swallowed, but didn't speak.
"Do you feel worse or better than you did say...four months ago?" Derek asked to Jason's silence.
"Well, worse but my oncologist said chemo does that to you."
"Do you feel more fatigued? Drained by the end of the day? Sleep problems? Your labs tell me you're anaemic, which is common."
"Uh, tired? I guess so. Sleep is okay. I try to eat more meat but...I don't have an appetite anymore."
Derek sighed. He could see through most patients, and this man wasn't an exception. "You've got to be honest with me for me to help you. No understatements."
He licked his lips before answering in a small voice, "If I do something in a day, I practically pass out when I get home. I haven't had more than five hours of sleep since the crash, first from...thinking about you-" He confessed, rushing those last three words almost as if he was embarrassed by them. "-then because of chemo. And I shove food down my mouth every day because I know it's what I'm supposed to do but I haven't felt the desire to eat in weeks."
Derek swallowed at that. He knew he was lying, but he wasn't sure he was expecting that.
"But that's the treatment not the tumour...right?"
"Yes. Those are all side-effects of chemo. But what about those things I mentioned before? Numbness? Weakness? Headaches? Speech, comprehension and vision problems?"
"Those are the things that the tumour gave me."
"Yes."
"So...my tumour is getting worse." He assumed before blinking and leaving a thin layer of tears across his eyes. He was a sensitive man and he was aware of that fact. He was also aware of the fact that those symptoms had become more prevalent since the trial.
"I know this is scary Jason, I know. But I'm going to do everything I can to remove this tumour, deficit free. And if I can't remove it deficit free, I'll do everything I can to make sure your life is as normal as possible." He reassured him in a soft voice as he watched the man's heart get crushed into a few more pieces. Clearly, the tumour related symptoms were getting more extreme and Jason had made the link before Derek explained it. He pulled himself away from the desk, feeling too unlike a surgeon. He didn't do desk consultations, that was the specific job he was at one time afraid of being chained to before he talked to Webber as his future as a surgeon.
He sighed, deciding that if he pushed on with his questioning, he might be forced to focus again. "What's your vision like?"
He didn't respond. He had found something new to distract himself with. To break himself with, even. His eyes were, seemingly, focused on the floor. Or, to be more precise, just above the floor. His doctor's shoes. That gave him a clue to what he was thinking about.
"Hi. My name is Dr Hill."
"Jason." He stated a little awkwardly as he settled in the seat opposite the woman. His leg bounced nervously with his trembling hands and the black circles under his eyes only helped her assumption that the man hadn't been sleeping, most likely due to why he was there.
"So, you reached out to me because you're struggling with something, but your email didn't give me much to go off. Can you tell me what's happening in your life right now?"
"I am- no...no, I was a lorry driver until about a month ago. Uh- three weeks, two days, three hours-" He glanced at the clock "-and thirteen minutes, to be specific...that's when-" He swallowed and the surface of his eyes drenched with water. "I don't sleep anymore. And I keep...I keep having panic attacks. I maxed out my library card on medical books and spend hours on the internet reading and reading and-"
"Do you read things about medicine on the Internet?" She interrupted as she felt her patient spiral.
"Mmm mmm."
"Why is that?"
"I...I hit someone." He confessed. "I hit someone in my eighteen-wheeled semi-truck and I am completely fine and he...he only just woke up from a coma. A medically induced coma. My lawyer told me that I paralyzed him. And that he has something called a TBI...a traumatic brain injury...which means he has brain damage. I wanted to look into that but there's so many parts of the brain and I don't know which one was the part that I broke.
"So, you're searching up things to do with his injuries then?"
His tongue flickered out of his mouth to refresh his lips. "One second, I was taking my regular shipment from Seattle and the next, I'm stood in the middle of the road, staring at this car that I had just beaten to nothingness and there's this poor guy inside, covered in his own blood with about fifty broken bones and bleeding organs. Then I'm in hospital, being told I have a freaking bruised rib, as if that really matters, but all I can ask over and over is how the guy is and they keep saying they don't know. I talk to the police and they don't know. I go to the hospital and they don't know. I snuck into the ICU and found the guy with this tube coming out of his mouth, breathing for him and these metal fixation things sticking out of his leg. He had one of those neck collars and his whole head was covered in all these bandages. He...he looked so...dead. And there was a woman there. And she just sat there and sobbed. She didn't get tired of sobbing. She just...she kept doing it. And I did that. I...I put a neurosurgeon in a coma, paralyzed him, and gave him brain damage."
"Jason-" The woman sighed as she stood and joined him on the sofa, only for the man to practically fall into her lap and just...bawl.
Dr Derek Shepherd didn't deserve what he did to him. He searched his professional and private life up online. The former told him that he was one of the best neurosurgeons on the planet, and the latter told him that he had a wife and two kids. His social media was just them together. Every single photo was him making stupid faces with his kids or proudly presenting their Halloween costumes or pictures of their Christmas gifts or, one that really made him stop, his daughter in a lab coat, on his shoulders, with the biggest smile he had ever seen on a human. He was a dad and a husband and he saved lives for a living. And he had just taken all of that away.
"Jason?" He called.
"Mmm mmm." He murmured back, but his eyes didn't move. He wasn't really listening.
"Jason, stop thinking about the fact my legs don't work and think about yourself. Please." Derek begged.
He drew his head up, swallowing. Guilty as charged. His doctor really couldn't have been more blunt with him. He couldn't think about anything but the fact that the man sat in front of him had been disabled by an accident that he caused. Whether or not it was his fault or not didn't really matter to him. Either way, his injuries still remained.
"Derek, I'm so sorry. I just...I did that and I-" He choked out, eyes now unapologetically staring at his chair.
"Jason. Seriously. I'm fine."
"You broke your spine. I broke your spine. I put you in a coma and then you had seizures and now...you're still in a wheelchair and I...Derek, I can't let you help me. It's just-"
"Jason, please. I know this is-"
"Are you going to walk again?" He blurted. He couldn't help it; he really needed to know.
Derek swallowed. "What?"
"That guy...that uh- doctor- he said- at the trial that no one knew whether you'd be able to walk again but-"
"I'm not." He interrupted before he could fall into a rambling pit. "You're about to ask me whether or not I'm going to walk again and the answer is no."
His eyes wettened with tears. "So...so I permanently broke you. Not just hurt you and caused you months of recovery but...permanently ruined your life."
He sighed. "You didn't break me and you didn't ruin my life Jason, okay? You didn't."
"I did. I mean, I know you're a surgeon again now but I still-"
"My mom has been worried about me. Really worried." He interrupted.
That silenced the man with confusion.
"So, my wife takes these videos of me and my kids because she knows it's a good way of proving I'm fine." He elaborated, pulling out his phone and opening his camera roll before handing him the phone. "When I say I'm fine Jason-"
"Careful baby." Derek murmured, shuffling back in his chair a little.
"I knows. We no like the floor." The blonde boy replied, grasping at the fabric of his pant leg above his knee. He had to hold onto something so he didn't end up on there.
"No we don't. Ready?"
"Yeahhhh!"
Derek smirked as his hands left where they had wrapped around his son to settle on his chair's wheels. He grasped them hard, pulling them back. But he didn't move backwards, he tipped slightly. Then they slowly edged forward a little, keeping himself angled so only the larger wheel of his chair touched the ground.
"All the way to the table!" Zola exclaimed, watching her brother and dad with a massive grin. However, hers was (somehow) broader when it was her own turn. She wasn't sure why, but something about sitting on his lap when he balanced like that was so entertaining.
"You really think I can make it that far?"
They had even both tried it at the same time. But it ended up in chaos and a mess of humans on the floor, limbs intertwined. Meredith would not stop laughing at that video.
"Of course!" Zola exclaimed with a face-long grin.
He inched forward more and more, Meredith following him with the camera as he reached the dining room table. "Careful!"
"I am being caref-" He reached the dining room table a little too quickly. He knew what was going to happen to them before it did, feeling himself tip a little too far and his son's weight fall against his chest instead of his lap until...
The answer to Zola's question was no.
No, he could not make it all the way to the dining room table with a wheelie without falling backwards.
For a second, the resonance of his fall radiated around the room until him, his son and the rest of his family burst into an unstoppable laughter.
"Ouch." Jason murmured, raising his brows.
"Meredith cut the part where it was just us laughing on the floor for like 10 minutes. My kids love it. It makes them cry with laughter. In fact, me and Bailey falling makes us laugh more than when I succeed."
He smiled a little. "They don't mind? That you are...well, you know."
"They hardly even notice it." He confirmed. "Jason, I know you feel bad. I would feel bad. But you have to understand that I don't want you to feel bad. Now, if someone told me that 'whatever happens, happens' catchphrase three months ago, I might have punched them in the face. But...it did happen. And I'm happy now. My kids are happy. And my wife is unhappy because she can't see her toes anymore but other than that, she is also very happy. So, Jason, if you're trying to apologize to someone for making them sad, you are in the wrong place."
He smiled, just a little. "Right. Thank you. Uh- what was the question you asked?"
"I asked what your vision was like?" He clarified, that conversation feeling like it was an age ago now.
"Oh right, it- uh, it's blurry. I can see but- it's like the camera isn't focusing."
"Photography metaphors now?"
He smiled, nodding once before his face fell. "It...it wasn't this bad before."
"Which is why you need this surgery."
"So uh- when do you want to do this? Like in a month or-"
"It'll take a while to perform, so I'll do it on my next day off, that way I have no risk of being pulled into an emergency surgery."
He absorbed the sentence for a second. It took longer to process than the wall of information he had chucked at him previously about the condition he would be left in if he didn't let him operate. "And here's me hoping for the first time in my life that doctors only get a day off once a year."
"It's next Saturday."
"You- you want to operate on my brain to remove a tumour that is probably going to kill me in nine days?"
"Yes." He confirmed, as if he was affirming his choice of desert, not when he planned to do something that could end or save someone's life.
"Are you insane?"
"Uhh- seeing as I'm offering this, I'm gonna go with a yes. Yes, I am insane."
"Well-" He sighed, smiling a little. "I- I guess I am too."
"Shepherd." An unknown voice shouted out.
Derek practically jumped at his name being called. He was too focused, eyes tracing around every single millimetre of the scan he had just put up on the wall, to pay attention to the outside world. He was just waiting for the computer visualization to load now. He turned around to see Webber walking towards him. "Chief. Hi."
He paused besides him, eyes on the scan. "Difficult looking tumour."
Derek turned back to look at it and slackened a little as he gave a heavy, air-pressing sigh. "Yep. Inoperable tumour, it's technically classified as."
"But you don't think it is, do you?" He questioned, although he knew the answer already.
"No."
"I heard you've promised a patient to remove their inoperable brain tumour." He stated. "I can only presume it's this one."
"I promised I'd try, not that it's going to work. I don't ever promise it's going to work, that's the point of the word." He corrected, reaching to rip the scan down as the computer finally loaded. Traditional scans were good, but new technology was extremely helpful in developing ideas.
"You remember that you're supposed to speak to me before saying anything." He reminded him.
"You don't think I'm ready to be removing it?" Derek questioned, not so surprised by his hesitation. He had said some…interesting things to the man last time they properly talked. He wasn't sure how great their working relationship was.
"I think I need to know what OR you need, how long you need it for, how you are actually opening the patient, whether this patient is requesting us to do it pro bono, what staff you're going to need and whether we need bouncers at the door because Dr Derek Shepherd is going to be removing the largest, most complex diffuse astrocytoma." He listed.
Derek was surprised. He was expecting a ramble about him doing this too soon because if it went wrong, it would break him. Although, he did consider that maybe it was because his condition would make the board double take on a casualty. They could say it wasn't his fault if the surgery went wrong, but instead they would say that no one should have cleared him in the first place, kicking him permanently out of the OR. He would much rather be blamed for his mistakes. But that's not what he got. He got a checklist that he hadn't done. And that was it. "That…that's a lot of questions."
"Well?"
"I have a day off next Saturday. I want to do it then, so I don't get pulled. My favourite OR, if you don't mind. Probably the whole day. It's an awake craniotomy. I'll be performing it for free, obviously, any costs you don't want to cover, I'll make sure he can. A rotating staff; it's going to be one long surgery. I'd like to have Amelia second assist me, she's on call but not working-working. If she has to go, obviously, that's fine. Just a preference. We've discussed the tumour together so she knows it well. And no, I don't think we need 'bouncers'."
He nodded as he absorbed the information before his eyebrows folded at the last sentence. "You need pictures for your work to be published. People will want to watch. People might even request to fly in to watch. What about our own doctors that want to observe? They won't be able to watch if a bunch of people from medical books and magazines and surgeons from different states or…whoever are taking up all the gallery space."
"Who said I wanted to publish this? I mean, I'm going to write an article, obviously, it's anything but a standard craniotomy, but this isn't that big of a deal."
He couldn't help but raise his eyebrows at the man. "Have you not seen the scan?"
"Many times, it is generally what happens when you plan to operate on someone."
"So you know how impressive it will be if you pull this off."
A hand scrubbed across his face, brushing his eye for just a second along with another one of those same sighs he had given just a minute before. "And I know what it'll read. Derek Shepherd, neurosurgeon at Grey Sloan, removed the most impressive tumour ever, blah, blah, this is impressive because he almost died not so long ago. Then a whole massive story about how I broke my spine and my skull and my legs and my brain and all that stuff. Then how impressive it is that I'm even alive after whole coma thing and the people thinking I was in a PVS because I wasn't speaking thing and the traumatic brain injury thing. Then plot twist number one, you see that picture of me sitting down? Yeah, that's not because it was a day-long surgery and I was tired. That's because I am physically unable to stand or walk. Insert shocking paragraph about the fact that I'm in a chair and all that great paralysis stuff. Then, plot twist number two, you know that guy he removed the tumour from? Yeah, that was the guy that did all those things. That's what any biography about me in a medical journal is going to read. I don't want that."
"It's a medical book about doctors doing ground-breaking work, not the Seattle Daily Mail Derek."
"Yeah. You say that now."
He sighed. He made a good point. If the same happened to him, he'd want nothing more than to keep that side of his life out of the surgical side. They greatly impacted each other, of course, but no one had any reason to share information about his accident for anyone to read if he didn't want them to. "You sure you can do this?"
"I'm sure that I'll go down trying."
"Okay." He smiled, feeling a little relieved by his answer. He at least seemed ready for the possibility of failure. "I'll book you an OR, all day, next Saturday. I'll look in the pro bono budget, but I can't guarantee you anything."
He returned the grin. "Thanks Chief."
"How are you?"
"Doesn't your favourite son get a hello?" Derek teased as he instructed his phone to shift to loud-speaker and placed it on the bed.
He could hear her airy smirk through the phone. "Hello, son, how are you?"
"Hello, mother, I am good." He replied, only slightly mockingly. He pulled on the breaks of his chair and transferred to the bed.
"Seriously now, how are you?" She asked. "And it's got to be more than...uh, five sentences." She instructed. He liked to skip the important details of his life so she always had to push him.
"I..." He sighed, scanning through his brain for a list of things to say. "Still haven't lost a patient. I had a day off and I went to the park with Mer and the kids. We had ice-cream, got the ferry, all that stuff. Oh- can't forget this one: Meredith built me an elevator."
"A what?" His mother gasped, not sure whether to be confused or shocked. She was sure she couldn't have heard that right.
"In the house. She hired a guy. And he built one, it ruined my poor study. And now there's only one non-ensuite bathroom upstairs. But I get to go there now. Actually, I am currently upstairs."
"You can do that?"
"Uh...apparently." He said with a shrug, despite the fact she couldn't see it.
"That's...yeah, I've never really heard of that." His mother replied, still a little shocked. She wasn't quite sure what she was imagining when Meredith mentioned that she was trying to make Derek open to the idea of making their house more accessible to him, but it certainly wasn't that. He was perfectly accepting of most of it, of course, he just, apparently, disliked the idea of his whole house having to change for him. "And the fifth thing? What's your fifth sentence?"
"You...are you sure you want to hear the last thing?"
"Derek. Christopher. Shepherd." She bellowed. "If you are hiding another life-changing injury from me, I swear to god, I will book a flight to Seattle right now to-"
"No, no, mom. No more secret injuries. Well, actually, I did have a paper cut just above my proximal joint on my index finger, if you wanted to be, you know, a hundred percent caught up on my medical history."
"You can't get out of this with jokes." She scolded, although it settled her anger. Now she was just concerned.
"Jason." Derek stated through a heavy exhale.
"Oh god, he didn't-"
"No, no, no, he's still alive." Derek clarified, his mouth moving so quickly to reassure her that his tongue could barely keep up. His mother really did love jumping to conclusions before he finished his sentence. "It's just, I was looking into the possibility that the tumour might...it might not actually be actually inoperable."
"Oh, that's great news! Who did you find? Cause I- uh, Amelia told me about that guy she used to work with-"
"Tom?" He suggested. He couldn't imagine Amelia would really mention anyone else. He was another one of the top neurosurgeons in the country and there were so few of them who dared to touch inoperable tumours. "Mmm, yeah. I sent him his scans two weeks ago, he said no."
"So who? Someone from Mayo? Mayo has always been known for their-"
"I'm doing it." He confessed, realizing that the guessing game was never going to stop. "I told Jason that I would remove his tumour. It's an awake craniotomy. Scheduled for next Saturday."
"You are doing a WHAT?
"Hey." Meredith sighed as she appeared at the door with a big pile of washing stuffed into her hands. She had no idea how she hadn't lost a sock or two...or ten, when moving between bedrooms with the amount of washing. Derek was curled up in a half-foetal position, eyes closed. "You okay?"
"Headache." He answered, looking up to her.
She settled the washing on the dresser and turned to look at him. "Migraine or actual headache?"
"My mom shouted at me for like ten minutes straight."
"Oh...it's a mom headache."
Derek smirked. He didn't know that these so-called 'mom headaches' were common enough to have a name. Although, it wasn't very original. "How do you get rid of a mom headache?"
"I always find kissing to be the best cure."
"Well." He sighed dramatically as she sat down next to him, lips just millimetres away from each other. "If it's the only cure, I guess I have no choice."
"Shame that-" They kissed. "-isn't it?"
He smirked. "No. Not really."