Doing Lines: The Best of Grey’s Anatomy Medical Cases

Posted in Entertainment, Lists by Traci

Welcome back to Doing Lines, a series in which we look into the most interesting and entertaining plot lines of our favorite TV shows (Did you miss the Gossip Girl one?). I’ve decided to do a little twist with this post, and only focus on Grey’s medical cases (plot lines/relationships and hookups to come in the future). Over the past nine seasons, my favorite medical drama has had it’s fair share of ridiculous cases come in through the doors of Seattle Grace/Mercy West. Here are some of the most memorable ones our fave doctors have had to treat.

Season 1, Episode 4

A construction worker accidentally falls down a set of stairs while holding a nail gun, and guess where all the nails land? IN HIS HEAD. Don’t worry, he survived the surgery after Dr. Shepherd (McDreamy) successfully took all of them out – except while he was in there, he found a brain tumor. wah wah.

this is why i don’t do construction-y things

Season 2, Episode 2

Dr. Bailey (the best doc in SGMW, besides Cristina Yang), treats a man who has a bowel obstruction, which they think is blocked by drugs. Except the x-rays reveal that those aren’t dimebags- they’re the heads of 10 Judy Dolls, which are like Barbie dolls. The great part was when she took out each Judy doll head, and reminisced about each one, like, ‘this was mod Judy, she came with a yellow vespa.’

imagine seeing this shit? it’s like right out of Mama or something.

Season 2, Episode 13

Another patient comes in with bowel movement problems – in that he’s having none – and it turns out he ate all the pages to his manuscript. The aspiring writer says, “I wanted to, literally, put it behind me,” which would frankly make me want to treat him less after a horrible joke. After the surgery, the guy still acts like a wackadoo, and it turns out the pages of his manuscript actually gave him mercury poisoning.

Season 2, Episode 18

A woman comes in after a car accident, but they soon find out she has a much bigger problem. She’s been having “episodes” 7 to 8 times times a day, and by “episodes” she means “spontaneous orgasms.” Some of the docs are envious, but she explains that she gets ridiculed a lot and can never go out in public. Being the geniuses they are, they fix her so she can only have “episodes” when she wants to.

Season 2, Episode 6

Any fan of the show can attest that this is one of the best episodes in Grey’s history. A train crash brings two strangers together (literally) as a metal pole impales the two of them. Young Bonnie (played by Dawson’s Creek alum Monica Keena) and older gentleman Tom obviously bond during their time together, but the risky surgery to remove the pole has to sacrifice one’s life while the other lives. In an emotional ending, against Tom’s insistance, Bonnie agrees to give up her life so he can live. Heartbreaking shit, yo.

Season 2, Episodes 16 & 17

The first part of this two parter aired right after the Super Bowl in 2006, and were the most watched eps in Grey’s history. Luckily, these two were arguably the best in the show’s history as well. A man is brought into the hospital because he was injured attempting to make a homemade bazooka. He was bleeding in his chest, so one of the paramedics, played by Christina Ricci, applied pressure to the wound to make the bleeding stop – except one of the Docs realizes that the man has a piece of unexploded ammunition inside of him, and the only thing stopping it from blowing up is Wednesday Addams’ hand.

The hospital immediately calls a Code Black, which shuts down pretty much the entire hospital, and brings in the bomb squad, led by COACH TAYLOR (sorry, Kyle Chandler). Wednesday starts to freak out because everyone is leaving, and she doesn’t want to die. In a state of a nervous breakdown, she removes her hand and runs out the door, but the bomb doesn’t go off- because Meredith instinctively puts her hand in the chest to save the entire place from blowing up.

After everyone goes off on her for being an idiot and comes to grips with the fact she might actually die, she carefully removes the ammunition, hands it to Coach Taylor, and as he walks down the hall, it goes off. He dies, but all the doctors, and the idiot patient who had the bazooka remnants in his chest in the first place, all lived. There is WAY more to this episode, so you should probs just watch it on Netflix instant.

Season 3, Episode 5

A man comes into SGMW lying on his back and his ex-wife straddled on top of him. Yup, you guessed it – they were having sex and his piercing hooked onto her dislodged IUD and they get stuck together. Ok, maybe you didn’t guess that exactly, because it’s freaking weird. The doctors managed to separate the couple, but he ends up having a heart attack right after they’re taken apart.

uncomfy

Season 3, Episode 14

A cancer patient is oddly the common denominator to staff members getting mysteriously ill, when George figures out that it’s her blood that is toxic, and making everyone pass out. A combo of her chemotherapy drugs and herbal medicine created a deadly neurotoxin, which obviously creates a problem for those treating her. Literally an entire OR staff falls down during her surgery. So the Docs have to take turns holding their breath to run into the OR and seal her cavity up before everyone dies.

bitches be down on the ground

Season 3, Episode 21

One of the hospital’s board members comes in after a recent trip to the Amazon with swollen genitals. Turns out that a parasite got all up in there after he spent some time in the Amazonian waters. It eventually comes out in surgery and it is disgusting. But Dr. Bailey and Dr. Webber have one of my fave convos ever in this ep:

Webber: There was a fish in a man’s penis.

Bailey: There’s always gonna be a fish in a man’s penis, chief.

Season 4, Episode 16

A stoopid teen gets stuck in cement after his idiot friends dare him to lie in wet cement just to impress a girl. The douchebags don’t call 911 until an hour after he’s in there, leaving him surrounded by a legit- a ton of cement. Not only is the cement weighing heavy on the kid’s body, but it’s also sucking out all the water from his body and toxins are building all up in there. Torres has to cut into his leg just to alleviate the pressure. Gross. Eventually they get him out – and the girl he was trying to impress actually revealed she liked him too. Their relationship was off to a sane and normal start.

poor choices, kid.

There are way more freakish cases in Grey’s, but this list could legit go on forever. Oh Grey’s, never change.

22Jan2013

Live Blog: I Tried To Live Blog Liz and Dick

Posted in Entertainment, Live Blogs by Molly

7:32 I’m still rooting for Lindsay Lohan. Casually, I mean — the way I still want my high school’s football team to win, but don’t want it-want it, because that would be sad.
The reason I’m casually rooting for Lindsay Lohan is that, if you asked me 10 years ago where I thought she’d be at 26, I would have pictured something better. Not an Oscar winner, but possibly a recent People’s Choice nominee. I thought she could play a pretty lady who falls in love, but also falls down in front of attractive men a lot, and has a quirky friend or a sister with kids. Maybe both!
But here we are instead, on Lifetime. I only read one review of this movie, a NYT piece that was only slightly less scathing than this review I read several years ago that was entitled “Mr. Magorium’s Wonder Emporium is Really, Really Bad.”
Please prove them wrong, Lindsay. I care, a little.

Cover of "The Parent Trap (Special Editio...

Lohan in kinder times.

8:01 Did the movie start yet? I couldn’t find my remote (it was under my butt.)

8:03 It’s still not on. Lifetime couldn’t fill two hours, minus 45-ish minutes of commercials? This doesn’t bode well.

8:05 This is supposed to take place in yesteryear, but everyone’s clothes look too modern…

8:05 This is not Liz and Dick. Liz and Dick starts at 9. Changing to The Best of Jimmy Fallon on VH1.

8:05-9:00 JIMMY FALLON. Am I right?

9:00 Lindsay looks pretty in the title sequence! I get kind of bummed when people say she’s looking old, because I’m a fellow ginger and realize that only a year or two of hard living stand between my face and Lindsay’s, which looks like broken dreams. By my mid-30s, I honestly expect to have a face that looks like it’s held together with scotch tape and hope.

This mugshot is found from http://www.perezhil...

I guess she looks okay here considering it’s a mug shot [File under: faint praise]. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

9:02 Ouch. This VoiceOver IS really, really bad.

9:03 All black outfits? Directors’ chairs? What even is happening? And where is James Lipton? He should be here.

When you watch Inside the Actor’s Studio, you have to drink every time they refer to acting as “my craft.”(Photo credit: Angela Rutherford)

9:07 First “violet eyes” reference. Fake Richard Burton just said “white hot bosom” with far less irony than I’d like.

9:08 LiLo is really splitting the difference between her Hallie Parker accent and her Annie James accent here.

9:11 Ugh, Caesar haircuts. The last time I found a man with a Caesar haircut attractive was when Joshua Jackson played Pacey Whitter. I can’t be blamed. I was so young then.

The Caesar was less-bad than the frosted tips in later seasons. (Photo credit: Wikipedia)

9:15 I tweeted one of my live blog observations, and immediately regretted it. What if Lohan sees it? She’s still just a human, with a twitter account and feelings. A bunch of feelings, I reckon. If she sees it, and insults me back, I just know it would be both accurate and scathing.

9:21 Lily Allen is singing? Distracting.

9:21 It was a Client List commercial. I, um, haven’t been paying much attention to this tele-film.

9:22 Liz and Dick are bathing in a tub that looks like a huge sink. It’s like they’re enormous babies.

9:24 I always feel confused when people named Elizabeth just go by Elizabeth. There are so many nickname possibilities! I’m just jealous because my parents gave me an Irish scullery maid nickname rather than a proper name.

9:28 I bet if Liz Taylor were alive, she’d be real diplomatic about this disaster. What does she care? She has violet eyes and invented White Diamonds, which smells like a really nice-smelling mom or teacher.

This is Elizabeth Taylor not worrying about LiLo because she invented a perfume that can be made into DREAMS.

9:30 Commercial for other Lifetime movies. All I know is, I’m going to watch the shit out of An Amish Murder, if I remember to.

9:38 Liz is truly an almost Dina Lohan-quality mother in this scene.

9:40 My favorite part so far was those 55 minutes when I watched Jimmy Fallon while waiting for this to start.

9:49 What’s going on? I’ve been reading the Internet and forgot to pay attention.

Sometime after 9:49 but well before the end of the movie I fell asleep by accident. I tried, sort of.

4Jan2013

In Defense of The Bachelor

Posted in Entertainment by Traci

What’s that now? Did you stop reading? Hold your horses and hear me out.

As one who reports on reality TV as if my life depended on it (literally, my job is to write reality TV news), I admit I was like you, reader, and was extremely skeptical about the entire process.

I confess, I watched The Bachelor/Bachelorette in high school. My TV taste has obviously changed in the past decade, and I hadn’t watched it since, until this past summer.

The Bachelorette, Emily Maynard, was down to her final four guys when I tuned in, and not knowing anything about this girl or the guys prior to the episode, I found myself extremely pulled in to her story and the guys she had left. This season was different than any other I’d seen, because Emily is a mother to a seven-year-old girl, so she’s purposely not sleeping around with the final few guys, since there’s so much more on the line than herself. I admit, I was Team Jef all the way, and was extremely (and perhaps, unhealthily) happy for this new family. I was pulling for them. I was gushing over every picture Emily posted of Jef coaching Ricki’s ‘Green Beans’ soccer team. I really thought they were going to make it. Until they didn’t.

But looking back on the entire season as a whole, I realized that yeah, I was drawn to the cast of “characters,” but I found myself emotionally attached to the situation in a way I never thought I would be. It was not like any reality show I had seen before. I’ve never been so intrigued with a group of people in a bizarre setting as this one. Back when I was watching the show as a teenager, the show was all about finding one true love. But as an adult, I’ve realized it’s the ultimate study in human behavior, and that’s why you should be watching it.

Ok, so forget about what you think about the show – the excessive kissing (and general whoring around), the cheesy rose ceremonies, the lavish and exotic dates. Let’s get back to basics of this show.

It’s the only program that truly captures how people react when their emotions are on the line. Not money, not a recording contract, but their emotions. How will these 25 people act when they’re thrown into one house, forced to live together, and even yet, vie for the same single Bachelor?

Of course they’ll behave differently because the cameras are on them. You would too. But I think that it comes to a point where yeah, they know that there’s a lens on them, but it’s such a background thought that they can’t help but let their real feelings come through. In everything they do, there’s a sense of truth and realness in it, even if the situations they’re put in are so ridiculous and would never happen in their normal lives. But even if they’re acting like a heightened, more dramatic version of themselves, there’s still a part of their true selves acting on the emotions.

So what happens if one starts to have feelings for that Bachelor? I doubt any of the Bachelor franchise ‘winners’ tried to be the last person standing in order to get fame or notoriety or money (If they did, then that’s an even more interesting aspect of social behavior). I’d bet that every single one who received the final rose was, at that very moment, completely and utterly in love with their on screen paramour. No doubt about it. It doesn’t matter if they break up days or months after the cameras stop rolling, it’s that in a twisted, fast-paced way – they found each other.

But when I thought about it, in the end, what makes this show so fascinating is that it’s really not even about the Bachelor/ette finding love. It’s how they got there, who took a part in that journey, and if they can withstand life without cameras around them. If someone you know just got engaged, you don’t ask if they’re in love – you ask how it happened. What is the sequence of events that led these two people together? A thousand different variations could happen if just one person in the cast of 25 is switched out, but their particular journey led them to this very outcome.

I’m a firm believer of the ‘everything happens for a reason’ mantra, and it especially holds true to this situation. If you’re meant to fall in love on a TV show, then so be it. If you’re meant to fall in and out of love in front of millions, then it’s only made you stronger for it.

So before you change the channel on Sean Lowe’s new season of The Bachelor, just give it a shot with a different outlook on it, because it’s not the process that makes these relationships fail. And it’s not that you can’t find love on the show. It’s how you deal with the aftermath.

(Abridged version of above: just watch The Bachelor so I can have someone to dish to on Monday nights, kthx)