Cristina obnoxiously bit into her apple, breaking the tension that loomed over the room. "Raise your hand if you're interested in cardio."
A few of the scrawny, young interns raised their hands eagerly, as if expecting Cristina to congratulate them, approve them. Meredith almost smirked. They needed more than a shared specialty to get Cristina's approval.
She rolled her eyes. "Then you're all working with Dr. Grey today. Abrams through Keating, you're with me. The rest of you are with Karev."
One girl raised her hand. She was pretty. Innocent pretty. Like the kind of girl who just graduated high school. She almost looked like Lexie, with her large doe-eyes and short, brown hair. "What about Dr. Hottie over there?" she asked, giggling as she pointed to Jackson Avery. He was speaking intensely on his cell phone, pacing around the room in circles.
More immature than Lexie ever was.
Meredith raised her eyebrows. "You're kidding, right? You're doing charts today," she said, handing her a stack of binders. "Go."
"God, I hate interns," Cristina said under her breath, tossing the core of her apple into the nearest trash can.
"We can hear you," a voice croaked from the back.
Cristina scoffed. "I know, and I don't really care," she deadpanned.
As if on cue, to save them from dealing with any of these adolescents, all of their pagers beeped simultaneously at their waists. The interns looked nervously at each other, as this was going to be their first call.
"Alright, people, let's move!" Alex shouted, waving them over.
They all sprinted to the emergency room. Meredith shoved her arms through the sleeves of her yellow gown as they formed a train, her tying Karev's gown, Cristina tying hers. She pulled her long, blonde hair into a ponytail and pulled on a pair of non-latex, surgical gloves.
In a large group, like a migration of birds, they all waited outside the emergency room. This would be Meredith's first case since the accident. She exhaled slowly and closed her eyes, counting down from ten.
Ten...nine...eight...seven...six...five...four...three...two...one.
She could feel her palms sweat underneath her gloves. She glanced at her interns, who were bouncing on their heels, anticipating their very first case. The wailing sirens reverberated in Cristina's ears.
The ambulance pulled to an immediate stop.
"Okay, stand back!" Cristina ordered as she opened the doors.
A paramedic holding a chart in his hands climbed out of the ambulance and handed Meredith a chart. Her paramedic windbreaker jacket swooshed as she walked with Meredith. "Jane Doe, twenty-five year old female, trauma to the chest in a car accident. She was shot through the windshield. Multiple lacerations on her abdomen with third-degree burns."
Meredith unwrapped the stethoscope around her neck and listened to the patient's heart. "She's bradycardic. Let's get her to Trauma One and stabilize her," she announced, gripping her fingers around the stretcher. Her interns followed on her heels and helped her rush the stretcher inside the hospital.
"On my count of three, one, two, three," Meredith called out. At once, all of the interns helped her lift the patient onto the bed. A team of nurse practitioners began organizing the intravenous wires and injecting morphine into it.
Meredith took her hands and pressed them lightly against the patient's abdominal cavity, feeling for internal injuries. Then, she took a thin flashlight and quickly shined them into the patient's eyes. "Patient's pupils aren't reacting. What do we do?" she asked.
"Order a CT scan, find out if he has any cranial injuries," an intern responded.
"Good, get on that. Someone page Dr. Sloane!"
Meredith quickly unwrapped packets of gauze and began unfolding them, preparing to pad them onto the patients' superficial wounds. "Okay, we're going to stabilize you and get you into immediate surgery, okay? We're going to take good care of you."
The ECG monitor began to beep.
"BP's dropping ninety-nine over forty-five," an intern called out.
"What do we do?" Meredith asked. "What's your name?"
"Anne."
"Hi, Anne. He's crashing. What do you do?" Meredith asked, urging her to respond.
For Chrissake, was I ever this clueless?
She looked around frantically. "Get a crash cart in here, now!" she shouted.
She grabbed the paddles and rubbed them together, hovering them over the patient's body. "Charge to two-hundred. Clear!"
She shocked the patient, her body levitating into the air. Meredith watched the monitor. Still crashing.
"Charge to three-hundred. Clear!"
Anne looked up at Meredith. "He's not responding! I don't know…I don't know what to do," she stammered, looking at her desperately.
She was about to start crying. Meredith stared at her, waiting to see if Anne would eventually have a stroke of insight, and perhaps, recall one of the many basic things learned in the third year of medical school.
"Push in two of epi, set up for another charge," Meredith ordered, taking the defilibrator away from her. "Clear!"
The red dot just kept flashing, flashing with its red glare. Meredith stared. "Push in three rounds of atropine. Charge to two-hundred – clear!"
She shocked the patient again. Beads of sweat stuck to her forehead. She blew her bangs out of her face and pulled off her gloves. There was a long, pregnant pause. All Meredith could hear were the sounds of her heavy breathing. The interns looked at her, in a sense of pity, yet disappointment that their first case had resulted in death.
"Time of death, twenty-two, fifty-two."
The nurses filed out of the room in silence, while the interns removed their plastic gowns and shoved them into the sterile trash bin in the corner of the room. Meredith placed her hands on her hips and bent over, trying to steady her breathing. Suddenly, a woman burst into the room, searching it worriedly, her thin eyebrows arched upward.
"Where is she?" she demanded.
"Who are you?" Anne asked.
"Where's my sister? Oh God…oh God, oh God, Lauren, is that you? Lauren…Lauren, oh God, please no." The woman ran her fingers through the hair of our Jane Doe, Lauren, silently pleading under her breath, in short whispers that amounted to almost nothing.
Meredith found her hand on the woman's shoulder, lightly squeezing it. "We did everything we could."
The woman furiously shook her head, with such uncertainty yet so much determination, she looked about as hysterical as some of the patients admitted into the psychiatric ward. "No," she said. "No, no, no, no. You didn't do everything! My sister's a fighter, okay? She fights. She's fought death hundreds of times. And now you're telling me that she's dead? You have to revive her. She can do this. She can…she can get through this," she rambled, tears spilling down her ruddy cheeks.
All of the doctors in the room stood still, patiently waiting for the woman to calm herself, to mourn her sister's death. Meredith touched her hand to her stomach and waited for the nausea to pass.
"You want to know what the last words I said to Lauren were? You want to know what happened this morning? We fought about our parents, their divorce. So I tell her to go to hell. I told my own sister to go to hell, and I meant it. And now she's gone. She's gone, and the last thing she saw of me, was me, standing there in front of her, screaming in her face, telling her to go to hell."
Meredith watched as the objects in front of her blurred. She blinked away the tears and stared up at the lights on the ceiling for a brief moment, then focused back on the woman. "I know what you're going through," she started, her voice cracking. "I know this is hard. I'm not going to tell you that your sister lived a full life, because I didn't know her. And I'm not going to tell you that life goes on, because most of the time it feels like it doesn't. And I don't want to give you false hope. She knew you loved her though. Sisters - they know you better than anyone else. They love you no matter what the odds. The best you can do, for now, is say goodbye while she's still in front of you. And then after you leave this hospital, you can take it on from there, just one step at a time."
The woman looked up at Meredith with her wet eyes, hopeful.
"I'll be back in a couple minutes," Meredith said. She shoved the doors open and heard the interns calling out for her, but she didn't turn around. She opened the door to the supply closet and kneeled over, holding her hand to her warm forehead. She gasped for air, but she couldn't. Tears streamed down her face uncontrollably. She felt her airway constrict, constrict so much she felt as if she were in an enclosed, claustrophobic area pressing against her sides.
From the corner of her eye, she saw the door creak open. Derek Shepherd stood before her with Zola in his good arm. His hand was still in its cast, but its full heal would be any time soon.
Quickly, she wiped the tears from her eyes and forced a smile at Zola. How could they come to this? Practically six years ago, Derek had been in this exact supply closet with her, stroking her head as she breathed into a paper bag after Ellis Grey's death. Now, their daughter, was situated in this room. It was an alternate déjà vu.
"Hi, Zola!" she said, expanding her arm span as Zola ran into them. "How are you?" she asked, nuzzling her nose to hers.
Derek watched her with sad eyes. "Meredith," he said.
She put Zola down. She wrapped her tiny fingers around Meredith's and looked up at her father. "I'm fine," she said.
He looked at her dubiously, his hands stuffed in the pocket of his lab coat. "What happened?"
"I'm going to be fine. Everything's going to be fine," she affirmed, sniffing. She rubbed Zola's head. "Mommy's going to go back to work now, okay? She'll be home in time for dinner."
"Bye, Mommy," Zola said brightly.
Meredith redirected her attention towards Derek, staring into his eyes that could see right through her façade. "I'll be okay, okay?"
"Okay." As he stared straight ahead, she gave him a quick peck on the lips and returned to Lauren's sister.