Grey’s Anatomy season 13, episode 8, “The Room Where It Happens,” followed Meredith, Owen, Stephanie, and Weber as they struggled to save a man while recalling important parts of their own lives.
‘Grey’s Anatomy’ season 13, episode 8 recap:
Meredith, Owen, and Stephanie head into surgery already tired from working long hours. Meredith discusses also dealing with her children being on a sleeping strike at home, and Owen not even sure how long he’s been at work. The surgery quickly gets messy and Weber steps in to help.
Meredith and Owen can’t agree on what to do on the patient’s kidney. Weber can’t stop talking about a former case he had and is trying to teach Stephanie a lesson. However it becomes clear that Meredith and Owen don’t think it’s the right time to be teaching in such a crisis.
Weber gets upset when no one seems to care about the actually patient, and only want to get in and out. They don’t know if he has a family, or what happened in his accident, or even his name. So Weber gives them an exercise in giving the man an identity.
Although Weber asks the others to come up with a new name and identity for their patient, he ends up picking it himself. He goes with the name Gale, and the patient is now a 46 year old women. Gale plays the cello, Weber decides, but no one else seems to really care.
They have to decide whether or not it’s worth it to do a liver transplant on the patient. Meredith thinks that it would be a waste of a liver since it would just get rejected. Even though Weber disagrees he doesn’t have much of a choice because Meredith outranks him.
When Weber realizes that his story isn’t working, he tells Owen to take a turn. Even though he says that he doesn’t need to give the John Doe a name because he’s used to it, he remembers working with his sister and how she mocked him for always trying to find the tags of their patients.
It just starts to distract him during the surgery and he isn’t sure if his plan will even work. So he decides to take out the liver completely and go for a transplant like Weber wanted, despite Meredith yelling at him not to do it.
While Meredith and Owen argue about the liver and whether or not they will get a new one in time, Stephanie notices something else is wrong with him. There’s blood in his urine and she thinks he has an autoimmune disease, the only way to help him is with steroids. If she’s right, any other option won’t help.
Just as they agree on a new course of action, a nurse enters asking if she can take a photo for his family to identify him. As soon as she finishes taking the photo, the patient starts to crash. As they try to bring him back, they find out that his family has given him a positive identification. They learn that their patient’s name is Carl and he has a wife and children.
Finding out that he has a family, reminds Meredith of what happened when she was at the hospital with her kids while Derek was in surgery. She wants someone to go talk to the family but it’s still all hands on deck as they get his heart beating again.
Meredith flashes back to the crushing moment when she had to tell her kids their father had died. It’s a brutal scene to watch as Meredith barely holds it together, and Zola wants to know why her mommy can’t fix daddy like she does all of her other patients. It’s then that Meredith realizes that Gale was someone important to Weber too, his mother.
Weber retells the story of how much he hated listening to his mother play the cello endlessly, until one day it stopped. When he recites the list of issues she had leading up to her death, Meredith is able to correctly guess that she died from cancer. The discussion gives Meredith inspiration, she wants to repair the liver that they’ve already taken out. Since they took out the liver it should be easier to repair and then they can put it back in the patient.
Once they’re able to successfully repair the liver and transplant it back into the patient, the doctors are also able to put their own demons to rest. Meredith apologizes to Weber for lashing out at him but he does’t seem upset. Instead he explains why he wanted to try the exercise. He realizes that connecting with the patients made him a better doctor.
Before Meredith leaves to go talk to the family, she washes up and sees a memory of Derek scrubbing up next to her. She’s only shaken out of it when someone else enters the room.
The episode was definitely a departure from the typical Grey’s Anatomy. The episode was beautifully shot and also gave fans a peak on moments from the doctor’s pasts that have shaped the people they are in and out of the operation room.
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