Last night while watching one of the final scenes in “Grey’s Anatomy” I lost it and started bawling, pressed pause and then immediately called the babysitter to leave her a message about how I couldn’t believe she didn’t warn me about the part where one surgeon climbs into bed with another surgeon and holds her head as she cries. Jon looked away from his laptop long enough to shake his head and say, “Why did you go and leave that message? You know she’s listening to that right now and thinking, ‘Dude, my boss is totally drunk.'”
I remember seeing the previews for this insipid medical drama and thinking, “NOT ANOTHER INSIPID MEDICAL DRAMA.” And I was right, “Grey’s Anatomy” is like “Felicity” in a hospital, overwrought and whiny to the point of being unwatchable. It beats you over the head with the notion that surgeons are just like me and you, insecure and lovable and full of adorable imperfections, that the only difference is that surgeons routinely stick their hands inside other people’s skulls and chest cavities. I’m sorry, but I have met surgeons and those people were abandoned on Earth by their alien hosts. You get the feeling when you’re around one that they’re looking at your head and assessing what size drill bit it would take to get to your frontal lobe.
If you’re a surgeon and you’re reading this you know exactly what I’m talking about. When you’re at dinner with your non-surgeon friends you find yourself thinking, “Is this what mere mortals talk about?” and you can’t wait to get back home so you can read the new research on intracerebral aneurysms because THAT IS WHAT GETS YOU HOT. I’m not saying that there’s anything wrong with that, but normal people? Normal people want a bag of Doritos and a ball rub and they’ll roll over satisfied.
Our babysitter is the one who got me into this show, this tedious ball of bullshit that I love with every proton and electron of my temporal being. I do not want to love it, but somehow the idea of sexy surgeons with great hair is comforting, you know, just in case I need a transplant. I’ve told Jon that if I have an accident and something needs to be replaced that no one’s allowed to cut me open unless they are as succulent as Patrick Dempsey, and before they put me under please get me a lock of his hair.
The babysitter came to our house yesterday and the first words out of her mouth were, “DID YOU WATCH IT?” and since I hadn’t I took her question as proof that it wouldn’t disappoint, that it would live up to an entire week’s worth of counting down out loud. But I had no idea that the one doctor who got the other one pregnant would stop being such a stereotypical prick and climb into her hospital bed after she lost the baby AND A FALLOPIAN TUBE and wrap his arms around her so that she wouldn’t have to face that horror alone. He was human, he was like me and you, and after I played that sequence three times, pausing each time as he took her head into his hands, Jon said, “You’re starting your period tomorrow, aren’t you?”