A Hard Day's Night

14K 257 14
                                    

It was my first day at Seattle Grace as a surgical intern

Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.

It was my first day at Seattle Grace as a surgical intern. The Chief of Surgery Richard Webber was showing us around.

"Each of you comes here hopeful. Wanting in on the game. A month ago you were in med school being taught by doctors. Today, you are the doctors. The seven years you spend here as a surgical resident will be the best and worst of your life. You will be pushed to the breaking point. Look around you. Say hello to your competition. Eight of you will switch to an easier speciality. Five of you will crack under the pressure. Two of you will be asked to leave. This is your starting line. This is your arena. How well you play? That's up to you," The Chief said showing us the OR. Once he'd shown us we headed to the locker room to get changed into scrubs and our lab coats. I'd been assigned to Miranda Bailey as my resident. We'd met all the other interns at a mixer last weekend.

"O'Malley, Yang, Grey, Stevens, Sloan," A doctor yelled. I followed a group down a hallway where a short black woman with black hair was standing talking to a nurse.

"That's the nazi?" Cristina asked.

"I thought the nazi would be a guy," George said.

"I thought the nazi would be a nazi," Meredith said. A blonde intern that I hadn't met walked past us to the front of the group.

"Maybe it's professional jealousy. Maybe she's brilliant, and they call her nazi because they're jealous. Maybe she's nice," The woman said.

"Let me guess. You're the model," Cristina said. The woman glared at Cristina before she turned to Dr Bailey.

"Hi, I'm Isabel Stevens, but everyone calls me Izzie," The blonde woman said holding out her hand. Dr Bailey looked her up and down but didn't answer her or shake her hand.

"I have five rules. Memorise them. Rule number one, don't bother sucking up, I already hate you, that's not gonna change. Trauma protocol, phone lists, pagers, " Dr Bailey gestured to the items on the nurses' station. "Nurses will page you, you answer every page at a run. A run, that's rule number two. Your first shift starts now and lasts forty-eight hours. You're interns, grunts, nobodies, bottom of the surgical food chain, you run labs, write orders, work every second night till you drop and don't complain!" Dr Bailey said as she showed us around the hospital. She opened the door to an on-call room. "On-call rooms. Attendings hog them, sleep when you can, where you can, which brings me to rule number three, if I'm sleeping, don't wake me, unless your patient is actually dying. Rule number four, the dying patient better not be dead when I get there, not only would you have killed someone, but you would have also woke me for no good reason, we clear?" Dr Bailey asked. Meredith raised her hand.

"Yes?" Dr Bailey asked.

"You said five rules. That was only four," Meredith said. Bailey's pager beeped.

"Rule number five. When I move, you move," Dr Bailey said. We chased after her up to the roof where an incoming air ambulance helicopter was meeting us.

The Lieutenant's LoveWhere stories live. Discover now