What is it about surgeons on Grey’s Anatomy and their super-secret tumors? From Amelia Shepherd to Nicole Herman, from Izzie Stevens to Richard Webber, these doctors simply love to hide life-threatening conditions from their friends and family. Just ask Catherine Fox, who’s on Round Two of keeping her family in the dark. The good news? She might not actually be dying just yet. But try telling her that …
Catherine might still be at a standstill with her least favorite surgeon, Meredith, over her unauthorized Alzheimer’s research, but Mer’s not ready to let her go down the pessimist’s path just yet when it comes to her condition. She runs some scans, which reveal what appear to be liver tumors (not great) and enlists Bailey for a consult after telling her who the patient is (because of course she does). Bailey isn’t Catherine’s biggest fan right now, considering she’s no longer technically employed at Grey Sloan thanks to Catherine’s power tripping, but Catherine also inspired, like, her entire career, so she puts that aside like a real pro.
After surveying the scans, Bailey suspects the tumors could be a benign side effect of Catherine’s Budd-Chiari syndrome and wants to do a biopsy, but Catherine won’t hear of it — until she gets a text from Richard, at which point she tows Bailey and Meredith to the bar, where they convince her over drinks to just get the damn tests.
As frustrating as it is to watch Catherine keep Richard out of the loop (again), she’s got a pretty convincing reason: With all the complications she faces each month, she doesn’t want him to worry all the time. Still, isn’t marriage supposed to be about supporting one another in… something… and in health? Food for thought, Cat! That said, I did cry when she and Richard were driving home together singing “Never Too Much†to one another because I, too, am only human.
Blissfully unaware of his wife’s health problems, Richard has a great day knocking Teddy down a peg and going out for a round of golf with Lucas and Winston. (Remember when all the guy docs of Grey’s used to do extracurricular activities together? We’re bringing that back!)
It turns out, Teddy’s got her job back, but only as a surgeon; she’s no longer chief until the top brass are convinced she won’t be “stealing†any more money to, say, fund a friend and colleague’s verboten Alzheimer’s research. Teddy shares this with Owen, who seems shocked, but she doesn’t want to talk about it much. What’s with surgeons and never accepting help? Amelia, too, has come back to her job only to discover that her lab has basically been confiscated. Even while battling a terminal illness, Catherine Fox does not mess around!
Owen’s a bit preoccupied this week anyway. His old friend Nora from his grade school days is in the hospital puking up blood. Naturally, Teddy and Owen wind up operating on her esophagus, and she survives. Not so lucky is Schmitt’s young patient, Cal, who has a genetic disorder called Li-Fraumeni syndrome that makes him highly susceptible to early onset cancers. Anyone else remember that poor girl from season ten who had it? I started weeping internally the minute I heard the disorder name, and by the end of this storyline, I was actually bawling.
Schmitt is determined to save Cal from his cancer and refuses to acknowledge that in the long-term, this is a losing battle. He’s practicing what he calls “professional detachment,†which he believes means that he doesn’t care that he didn’t get the peds fellowship, or that his patient will almost certainly die heartbreakingly young. Never mind that he’s railing at the hospital’s (very hot) new chaplain, James, for daring to indulge Cal’s obsession with death and bringing him a casket catalog. He’s gonna save Cal’s life, damn it! James straight-up tells Schmitt that he has a “god complex,†but like most people with a god complex, Schmitt is not hearing any of it.
That is, until we reach the most heartbreaking possible outcome. Amelia and Monica perform an astounding surgery to remove Cal’s massive spinal tumor, turning him on his side so that they can operate on his front and back at once, and they get it all. But while listening to the good news, Cal starts seizing. Turns out, he has a malignant, fast-growing brain tumor and has just weeks, maybe months, to live. Schmitt makes a valiant effort to keep things positive. He gives Cal the old “our sense of time isn’t fixed†speech and starts pushing him to list off activities he wants to cram into the time he has left — like finally going to space camp. But Cal is understandably pretty inconsolable, which leaves Schmitt crying outside. It was around this point, dear readers, that I was reduced to a puddle of tears.
Just like he did with Cal, James sits beside Schmitt and just listens as he describes his grief. Admittedly, I’m always the first person to ship a new character with Schmitt, but uh … did anyone else catch vibes from these two? No? Just me?
While I dry my eyes, let’s return to Richard’s golf game real quick. As fun as it is to see Grey Sloan’s surgeons embrace male bonding outside the office again, Winston also has an ulterior motive: He’s trying to convince Richard to reconsider stepping back from surgery (again). Richard absolutely crushes the golf game, and Winston points out that if he can still golf like a pro, he’s probably got more time left in the OR than he thinks. Enlivened by this shift in perspective, Richard hands the title of chief back to Teddy with a shrug. Her first act? Overseeing Catherine’s biopsy. We’ll see how that goes …
But this isn’t the only repercussion of Winston and Richard and Lucas’s Day of Fun. When Lucas gets back, the ever-annoying Sydney Heron gently pokes him for being so popular with the bosses thanks to a certain uncle named Derek. (Heartbreaking: The Most Annoying Person We Know Just Made a Great Point.) As he nurses the sting of that reality check, Lucas realizes that maybe he should repeat his intern year instead of letting some friend of his uncle’s bail him out, as Richard suggested on the golf course. He did, after all, operate on a patient as an intern without an attending, and that patient did bleed out and die. As embarrassing as it’ll be to go back to square one while all his friends (and his girlfriend, Simone) start operating right next to him, it’s the right thing to do. You go, Lucas! At least not moving to Chicago means he gets to keep snogging Simone.
As for the rest of our interns? Mika and Jules are embracing the time-honored Grey’s tradition of making out in the elevator, but they’re not very good at it, because they get caught. Blue, meanwhile, is stuck ducking in and out of ORs while explaining to his amnesiac ex-fiancée, who will not leave the hospital, why they broke up — and why she has so few photos of him. (Surely the hospital would not allow Molly to just hang out in the hallways, right? But I digress.)
The answer to all this is, of course, devastating: Blue and Molly met at a Halloween party, where she came dressed as a disco ball and he realized while looking at her reflection in all the tiny mirrors that “there’s no view of this person I didn’t like.†(That line — swoon!!!!) But as their wedding approached, Blue was spiraling because his mother wouldn’t be there, so he made a terrible mistake and cheated on Molly. They fought, and she took off in her car, which, as we already know, led to the accident that cost her her memory. Sorry — I need to grab a new box of tissues …
Of course, Blue kisses Molly before this conversation ends, which is about as awkward as one might expect. But she takes it in stride. She’s gotten to start over already, and with any luck, now Blue can let himself off the hook and do the same. Man. Have we reached a new Golden Age of Grey’s Anatomy? It’s really starting to feel like it. But maybe that’s just all the crying talking.