In which one Dr Izzie Stevens saves a man’s future erections.
Intimacy is a four syllable word for: “here are my heart and soul, please grind them into hamburger and enjoy”. It’s both desired and feared, difficult to live with, and impossible to live without.
No previously (again), so we’re straight through to Meredith discussing the perils of intimacy over footage of Izzie really taking this #noboundaries lifestyle to new limits. Wandering around in her underwear and a vest while brushing her teeth, she violates George’s privacy (and toothbrush) by walking in on him in the shower, then gazes over Meredith’s shoulder as she’s sat at the table, granting Meredith a nice eye-level look at her underwear. “Hello, kitty” indeed. Meredith has signed a cheque to an extended care facility (one assumes for her mother), and after coffee, it’s time to get to the hospital for 4:30am.
If George’s main issue was just “please stop coming in the bathroom when I’m naked in the shower”, I’d be 100% supportive of him, but he goes further than that. “Me gonads, you ovaries” is already pretty poor reasoning – what, he’d be okay with Karev walking in on him? – but then he kicks off at the prospect of having to buy tampons during what appears to be his turn to get the shopping in, and no, George, that’s not it. Real men are manly enough to buy tampons without being afraid of being thought “a girl”. Just ask the many trans men who still menstruate, or every man who has ever had to buy them for a woman in his life who menstruated. It’s not a secret, or something to be ashamed of, dude. Grow up!
That’s not to say that Izzie isn’t completely in the wrong here too, though. Just because you’re okay with nudity doesn’t mean you get to walk in on whoever you like when they’re naked! The root of the issue here? It’s not a big deal to Izzie because she views George in a completely non-sexual manner, and that hurts him right in the fragile masculinity.
In a more work-related note, Bailey is trying to hammer into the interns the benefits of (paraphrasing) “not treating your patients like crap when waking them up at 5am”. Karev is needling Izzie about her modelling past, again, and picks up the nickname Dr Evil Spawn in the process, which is both fitting AND witty. Meredith is praying she’s not on a case that requires her to re-do colostomy dressing changes every 15 minutes, but Christina is convinced she’s got something good. Something surgical. Something so awesome she won’t even tell Meredith.
She winds Meredith up about not knowing despite being “the intern screwing an attending”, and Meredith bites back “I’m not screwing” only to be met with Dr Shepherd himself, bright, early, holding coffee and offering to buy her breakfast. She requests that they keep their relationship strictly professional, to which he ominously promises, “well that’s what you’ll get”. Uh-oh.
It’s time for a mini-round of None Of The Interns Are Good At Their Jobs! Christina promptly forgets everything Bailey JUST tried to teach them about being nice to the patient. Her secret patient is a former scrub nurse whose chart she stole in order to get the jump on everyone else. What makes it worse – her patient is very well aware of this fact. Over at the other end of the patient see-saw, Izzie fails to show any sort of backbone in response to a male patient who refuses her as a doctor because he saw an ad campaign she did as a model.
George is whinging about nudity still, and Meredith is ignoring him, except to wind him up about being attracted to Izzie. “She’s not the one I’m attracted to”, he accidentally lets slip. It’s telling that Meredith doesn’t for a second think that it’s her – she too has an entirely non-sexual view of him in her mind.
The remaining interns (George, Alex and Meredith) are pulled from their normal tasks to go down to trauma and help Dr Shepherd, who was pulled from his planned surgery for something urgent. And boy, isn’t it just. The man on the gurney has a series of metal nails embedded deep in his skull and brain. Cue titles!
Metal nails man (real name Jorge) can’t see, but he is awake and talking – and freaking out. He tripped and fell down some stairs while holding a nail gun. That’s some pretty awful luck. Shepherd gets him dosed up on pain meds to keep him extra still, while Karev helpfully mutters things like “sick” under his breath. CT machines are down due to technical difficulties. George suggests an MRI, which to be fair would probably extract the nails as well as providing images of them being ripped through the man’s brain. The end result? Do some research, find a way to get helpful visuals, and do it fast, because infection is a major worry. They need to know if this has happened before, and if anyone has survived it.
Christina has exactly what she wants – Nurse Fallon’s case is hers, “the institution in need of an enema” – all in the hopes of getting to scrub in on a Whipple. We learn that Nurse Fallon and Meredith’s mother worked very closely together, but that she never met Meredith in all that time. Christina also learns that there is in fact a “human 2×4” who is still alive in the building, but she’s sticking with Liz for the time being.
After a brief interlude with Jorge and his wife (“you are in so much trouble” is an understatement, really), we spend some time with George and Alex. Initially, George thinks he might get a bit of respect from Alex for the fact that he gets to see Izzie and Meredith wandering around the house in their underwear. That notion goes out the window when Alex reinforces the fact that it’s because “they don’t expect you to do anything”. They’re treating him like a relative rather than a potential sexual partner, and you can see the blow land. Alex isn’t wrong – that’s exactly what this is – but he’s being deliberately cruel.
Izzie makes another mistake regarding Mr Humphrey by not telling Bailey what was going on before heading into the room with the patient. Obviously he’s *cough* sensitive about something, and I don’t just mean his prostate, and it needs addressing if Stevens is going to be a doctor at all today. While Meredith takes a history from Jorge’s wife (she thinks there might be more to this story than a fall down the stairs), Izzie comes clean about her modelling, to which Bailey essentially shrugs. Your past is no get-out, and she at least needs to try growing a backbone and speaking to her patient. The subtext is clear – even if you hadn’t been a model, you’re an attractive young woman, and you need to learn to face this.
Meredith has come back to Derek with Jorge’s history and an inkling that he might have a tumour. His response? It more or less doesn’t matter – unless they can get the nails out of his brain, and soon, Jorge is going to be dead anyway. George and Alex give them the sum total of their research. It’s happened 23 times before, and the helpfully vague consensus is “get them out quick and watch for bleeding”. George runs off to watch, while Alex shooes him away; he’s just found the ad campaign Izzie did. True to the evil spawn nickname, he immediately opts to make a bunch of copies, no doubt for nefarious purposes.
We do a quick run round all the patients: Jorge is in the OR, about to go under, talking about how his wife’s favourite colour is red, and how he hated the colour red when he first met her, until he had a Damascus-like conversion on the road somewhere, taking a photo of her running through a field of red flowers in a red dress. The urologist treating Mr Humphreys is determined to spare none of the nerves to minimise any chance of recurrence; this will, sadly, leave the patient impotent, but the urologist (“we call him Limp Harry”) is more fussed about his golf game, and is famous for never sparing the nerves. Christina is trying to watch Jorge’s surgery, but Burke runs her off to do more tests on Liz.
Speaking of limp – George is yet again embarrassed as Izzie dared to mention tampons in front of everyone in the OR gallery. Alex takes the opportunity to wind George up a little further. The audience at home cackle (or was that just me?).
Liz lays out the different types of surgeons to Christina – those that remember their patients as people, and those that don’t. They all remember their surgeries, but some of the best don’t remember their patients names at all, distancing themselves so they weren’t distracted by the personal stuff. Christina is waiting for the “colossal but” to drop, but before it has a chance to, Liz “The Institution” Fallon is mobbed by old friends and colleagues wanting to check in on her. Yang steps back to wait, feeling a bit like a tour guide.
The nailectomy (I’ve decided this is a word now) is over, and Dr Shepherd doesn’t think they’ve made things worse; they’ll know more in the morning. Until then, we have the delight that is Yang running around the hospital, trying to figure out why they haven’t scheduled Liz’s surgery yet. The woman’s dying of pancreatic cancer! Burke reassures Christina that “the woman has pancreatic cancer, we’re gonna do something” – but he wants Nurse Fallon to stay overnight, and Yang to stay with her. She wasn’t on-call before, but she is now!
Meredith drops in to pass on her (entirely pulled out of her ass) “mother’s regards” to Liz, who is buying none of it. The idea of Ellis Grey travelling and not practising medicine rings false. Liz’s “that’s a surprise” basically translates to “I thought they’d have to pry the scalpel out of her cold dead hands”; the follow-up of “is she well?” and Meredith struggling to respond says it all. We also get an idea of what Ellis Grey was like as a parent, and the overarching theme seems to be both uncaring and largely absent. Ouch. Nothing encapsulates that truth better than Meredith trying to get her mother to remember her family, with the aid of photos. Thatcher, and Meredith, are a mystery to Ellis, but the slightest mention of Liz’s name has Ellis lighting up. “She was excellent.” Meredith looks both disappointed and unsurprised.
Back at the Grey house the next morning, things come to a head. George didn’t buy the tampons, and now he has two mad women storming in on him while naked in the shower. I honestly wished he’d hurt himself a bit when he fell over. What a stupid hill to die on!
At the hospital, Shepherd appears to be keeping his promise to remain professional. There’s also good news – Jorge is awake, AND he can see!
Evil Spawn’s plan comes to fruition – he distributed photocopies of her advert around the whole hospital. Izzie responds by finally losing her temper, stripping down in the locker room. She’s not ashamed of her body, or her history. She’s proud of the fact that she bought herself an education instead. She rides that wave of righteous fury into her patient’s room and explains that she’s a doctor now. He needs to get over his chauvinism. The patient’s response is a lot deeper than that – he doesn’t want the woman who gave him an erection to be in the room when they make him impotent.
Yang finally twigs that Liz is in the hospital to see all her friends and die in the place she worked for so long. There is no whipple, no surgery, no hope, and she finds herself unexpectedly affected by it. Jorge, meanwhile, has bad luck coming to him – it was a tumour that caused his initial accident, and it’s not wholly operable. With conservative treatment, they could get 3-5 years. With surgery, radiation and chemo, they can get 99% of the tumour, and get 5-10 years, but he might lose his personality and memories.
Meredith drops in to give Liz an actual response from Ellis, that she remembers her very well. Nurse Fallon is unsurprised – “Ellis Grey never forgot a thing” – which can only prompt Meredith to start laugh-crying. She finally tells someone about Ellis’ Alzheimer’s, and they commiserate over how much of a bitch Ellis was.
We start to wrap up our patients of the week: Jorge and his wife decide to get the surgery and take the extra years. Izzie is willing to respect her patient’s wishes, for a specific reason, but Bailey is having none of it. She’s a doctor, there to treat patients. The man is her patient. She can stay in the scrub room, but she’s not getting away from her responsibilities.
When Christina finally returns to Liz’s room, she’s dying in earnest. They were never going to operate; she was always coming here to die, and running Christina around? Well that was just fun, like hazing. She crashes, and Christina runs the code, until they realise she has a DNR. Yang doesn’t care – she cares about this patient, and it takes Burke physically pulling her away and stopping her to cease the resuscitation attempt. She’s already gone; it would be cruel to try and keep her alive only to die again shortly.
Fresh from her distress about her mother, Meredith goes to see Jorge’s wife Zona, to explain the personal side of the potential side effects. Without saying that her mother has Alzheimer’s, she tries to influence her patients to go another way, but Zona doesn’t care. She knows what the side effects mean. Even if it’s 10 bad years, she wants all the time she can get with the man she loves, even if he’s not himself anymore. Derek is disappointed in her, and Meredith isn’t going to explain herself. She goes off to see her mother, searching for any affection Ellis still has for her; the next morning she meets Derek for breakfast.
You take it where you can get it, and keep it as long as you can. And as for rules, maybe there are none. Maybe the rules of intimacy are something you have to define for yourself.
The only bright spot at the end of this episode is Izzie, who has stayed in the scrub room throughout Mr Humphrey’s operation. Dr Victor is still refusing to save the nerves. He’s still more fussed about his golf game. Izzie refuses to back down, and with Bailey backing her up, they essentially force him to spare the nerves and give the patient a chance at life. “What the patient wants is an erection” – it’s short, it’s pithy, and it’s very true. Plus Bailey’s joke at the end – “now you know every time he gets a rise, he’ll be thinking if you” – is a classic.
And George has come to terms with some of the realities of living with women. Izzie watches him getting out of the shower.
He’s still (rightfully) bothered about the toothbrush though.
Sum it up
All in all a solid episode! Interesting twist on the expected “you’re a model, you can’t be a doctor” storyline – focusing on the emasculation side of things rather than “you’re an airhead” is a different way to go about it. Emasculation was the key theme this week, far more so than “intimacy”. Alex’s constant digs at George, combined with his frustration at how Meredith in particular doesn’t see him as a potential partner, were ever-present. While I think someone should probably just have explained that REFUSING to buy things like tampons makes you seem like a child, whereas buying them confidently would be the manlier thing to do, at least he learned stuff. Liz was an excellent patient, seeing the softer side of Christina develop a little more without losing her edge. Clearly teeing up some tension between her and Burke, too. Overall rating: 7/10
Hero of the Episode: One Izzie Stevens, for growing a spine and saving a man’s sex life.
Zero of the Episode: Georgie-boy, you learned your lesson, but I’m still pissed with you.
Literally Incredible: I was going to say 7 nails one skull, but apparently there’s a dude in Oregon who survived 12 of them? So I’ll go with either the hospital or an insurer authorising a biopsy, MRI, bloodwork etc etc on a dying woman with no prospect of further treatment. Wouldn’t happen in the USA as I understand these things.
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