Derek is in a serious depression and refuses to go to work after losing
his pregnant patient and being hit by a lawsuit.
Mark hasn't operated in days, because his hand is still swollen after
the fistfight with Derek. Lexie urges him to talk Derek out of his funk
and Mark points out he's hardly the right person to do that.
Cristina wakes Owen, who's napping on a cot at the hospital. Coming out
of a nightmare, he shoves her violently, resulting in a cut to her arm.
He bandages the cut and tells her to rest her arm and not do any work
for the day.
Richard is cranky because he's now lost the services of Derek, Mark and
Cristina. He's also mad at Miranda for having chosen pediatrics over
general surgery.
Derek's depression deepens after he meets with his lawyers and they
tell him he's lost more patients than he's saved. "Most of those were
terminal patients," Meredith reminds him. "You were their last chance,"
she says, and urges him to look at the big picture.
"This is the big picture," he insists, staring at the far-larger pile
of his patients who died.
Izzie gathers the interns to diagnose the case of a "Patient X," that
they don't know is really her. The interns can't find anything wrong.
"She's fine," they all agree, and Izzie shouts, "No, she's not fine!"
She orders them to look over the case again. Lexie thinks that there's
something in Patient X's brain that they've missed and Izzie tells her
she's on the right track.
Miranda suggests closing a patient with staples, not stitches, and
Richard snaps that since it's his hospital, they're going to do it his
way. "I want all of you people to do what I say," he shouts.
"We have a diagnosis," Lexie announces to Izzie. "Metastatic melanoma."
Izzie asks for their prognosis and the interns predict the patient will
only live a few months. "The girl's pretty much toast," says one.
"Survival rate is five percent," says another. Izzie doesn't let on,
but she just says "good job." They want a prize, like last time and she
tells them, "The prize is, you didn't screw it up this time. You were
doctors today. That's the prize."
Lexie thanks Izzie for the diagnostic exercise. "How would you break
the news to Patient X?" Izzie asks. "Screw the odds. My mother died of
the hiccups," Lexie says. She decides she'd urge the patient to face
the illness and fight.
Adele summons Richard and Miranda to the conference room. "Are you
running a hospital here or a playground?" she yells at Richard, and
demands he apologize to Miranda. She tells a smug Miranda she's no
better, since she called Adele to "tattle on a grown man." They each
apologize for the way they've been acting.
Alex makes a diagnosis that could potentially save or kill a high
school student suffering from seizures when he decides it's her heart
that's the problem. Despite Dr. Robbin's reservations, Alex is proven
right. Arizona congratulates Alex on his success and says, "You fix
that attitude of yours, you could be the future of this hospital."
Alex runs to tell Izzie about the unexpected praise. He advises her to
stop "wasting her time with this Patient X crap," and that she could be
a great surgeon. "I don't want to be the future of this hospital if
you're not there with me," he says. She answers "Okay," and gives him a
big kiss but her smile fades as he walks away.
Derek returns to the hospital, but only to tell Richard that he's not
operating. Richard orders him back to work, but Derek just walks away.
After three days with no Derek, his patients begin to switch to other
hospitals, so when Miranda tells Richard that the way he yelled at her
in the OR is "not okay at all," he walks away without saying a word.
Richard asks for Meredith's help in bringing Derek back. "He's been
planning to propose. That's not a man who's planning on being alone."
Lexie announces to Mark that the survival rate for their relationship
is probably about "three percent," but that she thinks they shouldn't
give up.
Cristina assigns herself back to trauama cases, although Owen wants to
let her rest her arm. "I'm a big girl. I can decide when I've had
enough trauma," she tells him. "It's going to take more than a bad
dream to scare me off."
"It's more than a bad dream," he says and she answers, "I know."
Callie has been avoiding Arizona but ends up stuck in the elevator with
her. Arizona tells her, "Sometimes I panic and I misjudge a situation.
So, if you're up for it, I'd like to take you to dinner."
"Maybe," says Callie as she walks away. But then she stops the elevator
and says, "How's tomorrow?"
Mereidth finds a drunken Derek playing golf at the site of the home he
plans to build. He tells her, "I'm not hiding, I'm done. I'm done
operating."
When she calls it "quitting," he says, "You wrote the book on
quitting." She insists she's here for him now and he replies, "You
wanted me out ever since the day I moved in." He tells her she lied to
him when she said she was fine. "There's no fixing you. You're a
lemon," he says bitterly. She reveals she knows about the ring and he
bats it into the distance and yells at her, "Go home."
Izzie picks Cristina of all people, to confide in because she knows
Cristina can handle the bad news. On the air vent, Izzie tells Cristina
that she has cancer.
