522 "What a Difference a Day Makes" » The 100th Episode

One hundred episodes. WOW. It takes five years to make it to one hundred episodes. Five years of five seasons of Grey's Anatomy. And if we're looking at rough estimates, if you average two to three medical cases per episode, that's one hundred multiplied by two or three, and then we're looking at two to three hundred medical cases (we're writers, not mathematicians) that required brilliant ideas in the writers' room to thorough research, and... again, WOW. We're exhausted. So to celebrate the big number and the deserved exhaustion, let's take a look through medical history on Grey's Anatomy. Here are one hundred awesome medical cases from the show, beginning with my personal favorite top ten...

   1. BOMB in a body cavity (Episode 216, "It's the End of the World...")
   2. Pole impalement from train accident (Episode 206, "Into You Like a Train")
   3. Face transplant (Episode 518, "Stand By Me")
   4. The Candiru "Penis" Fish (Episode 321, "Desire")
   5. Fibrodysplasia Ossificans Progressiva (Episode 319, "My Favorite Mistake")
   6. Internal Decapitation (Episode 401, "A Change Is Gonna Come")
   7. 'Toxic Girl' -- mix of chemo & herbs (Episode 314, "Wishin and Hopin")
   8. Domino Kidney Transplant (Episode 505, "There's No 'I' In Team")
   9. 65 lb Abdominal Tumor (Episode 106, "If Tomorrow Never Comes")
10. 'Pregnant' Man -- Teratoma (Episode 207, "Something To Talk About")

... and we also have (in no particular order): Neurocysticercosis; penile fracture; pencil in the eye; separation of conjoined twins; the plague; thirty-second memory woman; nails in the head; boy encased in cement; bovine valve replacement; perforation due to swallowing Monopoly game pieces; C-diff needing a fecal transplant; building a kid ears; pectoral implants; pregnancy in two uteruses; sexual reassignment surgery; VATER syndrome; ice axe in hiker's head; PICA; syphilis outbreak; Rasmussen's encephalitis with a hemispherectomy; twin-twin transfusion syndrome; blushing girl with ETS surgery; extra-uterine pregnancy; cystic fibrosis; gunshot to the head survives; emergent heart surgery while trapped in an elevator; porn as pain treatment for a herniated disc; cutting out own appendix; man swallowed the heads of "Judy" dolls; prophylactic surgery for ovarian and breast cancer -- BRCA 1 & 2; Marfan's Syndrome; heart catches on actual fire in the O.R.; quintuplets; prisoner swallows razor blades and light bulb shards; leeches to help with blood clotting; esophagus ruptures due to competitive eating -- Boerhaave's Syndrome; mercury poisoning due to ingesting an entire book; EXIT surgery; flesh-eating bacteria; hockey player cuts off own finger in order to play in big game; Lionitis boy with brain tumors; woman with spontaneous orgasms due to AVM on a certain blood vessel; couple shot with the same bullet; boy impaled by tree branches from street luging; corpus callosotomy -- cutting brain in half -- to reduce seizures; man with spinal stenosis causes fish market accident; water addiction -- hyponatremia; body integrity identity disorder; man lights himself on fire from lighting cigarette near oxygen tank; C5 fracture from football accident causing bone fragments to lodge in spinal column; baby suffers from stroke due to exposure to meth; severe infection due to dangerous leg-lengthening procedure; hypopharynx reconstruction -- re-building the windpipe; chromosomal condition causing someone to not feel pain; night terrors that cause a man to jump out the window; Stage 2 Diabetes with foot amputation; 'Piggy Back Transplant' -- heterotropic heart transplant; spinal fluid leak that presents as chronic runny nose; leiomyosarcoma wrapped around the celiac, splenic, and left gastric arteries necessitating all six organs to be removed and then returned; brain bleed causes complete personality shift; man in persistent vegetative state finally wakes after sixteen years; kid swallows magnets causing intestine tear; wide awake open heart surgery; scalp ripped off from bear attack; blown carotid; tumor on the parathyroid that causes bones to easily break; pregnant woman with severed arm; a carcinoid tumor that causes serotonin levels to rise at extreme rates; fasciotomy on a marathon runner; brachial plexus surgery on Burke; woman in plastic bubble due to cardiomyopathy and COPD; heart outside baby's body also known as ectopia cordis; patient who claims to be psychic but really has brain AVM; priapism; woman with cardiomyopathy that experiences heart attack on same day of every year; discovery of ovary in man with pain in his bladder; removal of a musician's pacemaker to restore his sense of rhythm; cardiac autotransplantation ("Humpty-Dumpty surgery"); severe chronic headache due to an anterior ethmoid neurovascular complex; deep brain stimulation to reduce Parkinson's Disease symptoms; hypothermic circulatory arrest for Bartender Joe's aneurysm repair; liver and intestinal transplant for little boy; prophylactic stomach removal for the CDH1 gene; Tay-Sachs Disease; alcohol septal ablation for hypertrophic cardiomyopathy; Toxic Epidural Necrolysis syndrome; hydrocephalus; damage control surgery; sudden antenatal death syndrome; Alzheimer's Disease; seventeen gunshot wounds to one person...

And there you have it. One hundred medical cases from Grey's Anatomy. Just wait until what we do next...