Grey’s Anatomy: Season 20, Episode 5, “Never Felt So Alone,” Recap & Spoilers

Grey’s Anatomy has had its fair share of intense episodes. But this particular episode deals with a situation many deal with in silence.

The intern exam is approaching, and each of the interns are studying in their own way. Mika Yasuda is having her girlfriend, Taryn Helm, who is the Co-Chief Resident at Grey-Sloan Memorial, quiz her in Joe’s Bar while Simone Griffith sits down at a table right next to Lucas Adams’s table, though they’re still not speaking. Lucas removes his headphones, considering saying something, and when he gives up, Taryn asks Mika if she thinks they’ll ever speak to each other again. Mika doesn’t care; she just wants them to finish their procedure logs.

At Grey-Sloan, Teddy Altman, Miranda Bailey, and Owen Hunt are on their way out for the day, commiserating about their toddlers’ eating habits, when Bailey and Hunt are paged to the pit. Multiple traumas are coming in, so Hunt pages the interns, and only Altman is on her way, as she’s still not cleared for surgery after her health scare. Jo Wilson and Atticus “Link” Lincoln are also supposed to be on their way out when they’re paged to the pit — but not before Jo realizes that her period is late and she might be pregnant.

In the lab, Meredith Grey is visiting from Boston to work on research with Amelia Shepherd. They’re attempting to confirm certain bacteria in the gut that might lead to Alzheimer’s, and Amelia can’t believe Meredith is eating while they’re literally reading about other people’s crap. “Becoming my mother terrifies me that much,” Meredith says, just as her phone buzzes. It’s Zola, who is trying to get Ellis to go to bed. She won’t go because she’s waiting for Nick Marsh, Meredith’s boyfriend, to read her a story. It’s only when Meredith tells Zola to “just ask Nick” that Meredith learns that Nick has taken her middle child, Bailey, to the hospital.

Yasuda, Helm, Griffith, and Helm are heading into the pit, and Yasuda is complaining about being there. Her procedure log is done, so she thinks she should get to be home studying or sleeping. Griffith tells her that she should just ask her Co-Chief Resident for an exemption, but Helm isn’t going to give her one. Especially not after they arrive at the pit, where they find it full of medical students. Hunt tells the interns that the medical students were celebrating receiving their white coats when the second-floor deck collapsed. Most of them had small cuts or musculoskeletal injuries, but there were still ambulances on the way. Bailey tells them all to take a chart, and the interns disperse — Helm and Yasuda head for two men, both of whom are too drunk to stand, and Griffith meets Eddie Oliver, who has dislocated his shoulder. Link, already examining him, gets a signal from Wilson to join her elsewhere and hands Eddie off to Griffith, who is supposed to reduce his shoulder dislocation and take him for an MRI. Adams offers to help, but Griffith tells him that Kwan is already helping her. Griffith doesn’t want to work with Adams, as things remain tense between them, and is grateful when Kwan catches on. Before Adams can say anything to Griffith, Hunt calls for him, needing his help on an ambulance that is coming in.

Upstairs, Meredith is pacing and waiting for Nick to answer the phone. In Boston, he answers the phone from the hospital room where Bailey is sleeping. Meredith, obviously angry, wants to know where Bailey is, and Nick tells her that Bailey has early appendicitis, but he’s on antibiotics and morphine for the pain, and a doctor will be calling Meredith for consent to perform the appendectomy. Nick tries to explain why he hasn’t called yet, but Meredith isn’t interested in what he has to say, telling him only that she’s changing her flight before hanging up on him.

Adams and Hunt meet the ambulance bringing in Sophia Valdez, also from the white coat party, who was impaled by a wooden beam. She’s most upset that the paramedics took her coat, which she’d just received, so Adams tells her that he’ll find it for her. She tells them that she can’t feel her right leg, which must be bad, and Hunt and Adams take her into Trauma 3. On the way, Hunt tells Adams to page neuro.

On his way to see a patient, Winston Ndugu is stopped by a courier, who hands him a large manila envelope. Though he doesn’t fully pull the papers out of the envelope, there’s really only one thing it can be — divorce papers. He puts the pages back in the envelope just as Jules Millin joins him to meet with their patient. Gilbert, obviously an anxious man, is awaiting a cardiac ablation, but Millin can barely get the words out before they’re joined by a fourth person. A woman in matching leggings and a long-sleeved shirt climbs up behind Gilbert on the bed, wrapping her arms around him just as he’s starting to panic. Ndugu, alarmed, says, “You know we can see you, right?” Gilbert tells him that the woman, Angela, is a professional cuddler he started working with when the medication stopped working for his condition. Angela says that cuddling helps release endorphins and oxytocin, which help with stress and anxiety. Millin tells them it’s fascinating, but Ndugu calls it a racket before leaving the room to check on Gilbert’s labs.

In the supply closet, Jo is trying to find a pregnancy test with very little luck, and she’s spiraling. With both her and Link working so much, them already having two kids, and her written exams coming up, it’s a terrible time for them to have a baby. She doesn’t understand why Link isn’t also spiraling, and he tells her that they’ll figure it out. They’ll raise a third kid, or they live in a state where Jo has options if she wants them. Most importantly, they’re in it together, no matter what. Before she can take the test, Jo gets paid for a patient with abdominal pain and hands the pregnant test she finally found to Link, who says, “You do realize this doesn’t work if I take the test.”

Shepherd joins Hunt and Adams in Trauma 3 with Sophia, who wants to know how her x-rays are. Hunt tells her there’s no visible injury around the lungs and no free fluid in the abdomen or around the heart before telling Shepherd that Sophia is a first-year med student. Shepherd asks Sophia to wiggle her toes, but only one foot moves. They need a CT right away. As Sophia is telling him that she’s wanted to be a surgeon most of her life, and used to watch whipples as a kid, Adams comes in with her white coat, which is covered in her blood. Sophia is both glad he’s found it and distraught at the state of it, and Hunt has to calm her down to keep her from moving and making anything worse.

While trying to get a new flight out of Seattle to Boston, Meredith is approached by Richard Webber, who wants to know if everything is okay. She tells him what is going on, and when he asks if he can help in any way, she asks him if he can fly a plane. “No, but let me call Catherine,” he says. Meredith tries to stop him, but he won’t have it. It’s her son, and they’re going to get her to Boston.

In the pit, Yasuda, obviously the best intern, has just finished an arm laceration and goes to Levi Schmitt, the other Co-Chief Resident, to find out what’s next. He tells her that there is a fast track set up for some of the easier cases, which he thinks she’ll be able to handle quickly, and she tells him that she was the fastest pre-rounder in medical school. When she approaches the fast track, however, one of the drunk medical students lets go of the glove he’s making into a balloon, and it hits her in the face. It’s clear this is going to take some patience.

While Adams gets Sophia set up in CT, she tells him how much she wants to be him, and asks him if he’s ever wanted something so much it hurts. “Like, you can feel it in your body, and you’re so close to getting it?” She continues. He tells her that he understands, and it’s obvious he’s thinking about something — or someone — very important to him. Hunt calls him out of the CT room, so they can run the scan, and when it comes up, Shepherd asks Adams to tell her what he sees. The wooden beam appears to have partially severed her spinal cord and created an expanding hematoma. They’ll have to take out the beam, irrigate the hematoma, and hope for the best. Adams is frustrated that they’re only going to hope, and Hunt tells him that “doing more could cause her entire spinal cord to stroke out, or she could die from complications,” and then tells Adams to book an OR.

Back in the pit, Bailey notices Griffith yawning and tells her that she’s nearly at her max hours and needs to go home. Griffith says she will after Eddie’s scans come back, but Bailey tells her she needs to go now. Griffith attempts to pass Eddie on to Kwan, who helped her with Eddie’s dislocated shoulder, but when they go to find Eddie in Bed 4, he’s gone. “Bailey will kill us if we let a drunk medical student loose in the hospital,” Griffith hisses, but Kwan isn’t going to take any responsibility. “You lost him,” he says, and Griffith tells him to shut up and help her.

On Catherine’s private plane, Meredith calls Nick as she’s settling in, asking him how Bailey is. Bailey has been taken to pre-op, and Meredith tells Nick she should be there by the time the surgery is done and Bailey wakes up. Then she wants to have the conversation about why Nick didn’t call her sooner. He tells her that Bailey said his stomach hurt on the way home from hockey practice, so Nick did a quick exam and found rebound tenderness, so he called the doctor on call, who told him to bring Bailey in. Meredith tells him that he should have called her, and he says, “Yeah, I could have, but I wanted to see what the doctor said before I worried you.” Meredith reminds him that she is a doctor, and Nick tells her that he is too. “I’m his mother. You call me,” Meredith says, and Nick agrees and tries to tell her that next time he’ll do things differently, but she interrupts him. “No next time. If any decisions need to be made, call me immediately,” she says before hanging up on him again.

Yasuda, who is trying to get one of the patients in the fast track to follow the light on her pen, is moments from losing it. The drunkest of the pack is taking off his pulse oximeter and putting it back on, repeating “Dead. Alive. Dead. Alive,” in time with the beeping of the machine. Yasuda turns off his monitor and then approaches Helm, asking her if she can help swap her out. “I’ll see what I can do,” Helm says, leaving Yasuda to manage the drunkest patient and his friend, who is playing with the wheelchair he’s in, alone.

Ndugu’s patient, Gilbert, is supposed to be prepped for surgery, but when Ndugu reaches his room, he sees that he isn’t. He confronts Millin, and the professional cuddler, Angela, steps in to tell him that Gilbert’s heart rate kept going up while Millin was trying to do an echo. Angela suggests that they wait another 30 minutes before trying again, and Ndugu snaps at her. “I’m not going to shift around my schedule because my patient needs a human weighted blanket!” Millin asks Angela to check on Gilbert and when she leaves, Ndugu lays in to Millin for not doing the task he gave her, and at first she responds by telling him that she’ll try again, but then she changes her mind. “I know what I’m about to say it way out of line,” she says, “but it’s late, and I think you need to hear it. You used to be the coolest attending. Everybody wanted to be on your service. But lately, you’ve kind of been a jerk.” Ndugu tells Millin that she is right; it is way out of line, but she doesn’t stop. “I am desperate to learn from you. But not if it means being disrespected or standing by while you disrespect our patients. Gilbert is in pain. He is scared. And if paying someone to hug him helps him with that, who are we to judge?” Ndugu’s only response is to tell her that he wants the patient prepped within 20 minutes.

In the OR, Hunt and Shepherd are getting ready to operate on Sophia. They learn that her recently deceased father was a trauma surgeon and that he told her that the OR had an invisible energy “like the force in Star Wars.” Before they give her the anesthesia, Sophia asks them to make sure her coat is with her belongings. “I don’t care if it’s ruined,” she says. “I want to keep it.” Both Hunt and Shepherd agree before putting her under.

Griffith and Kwan are still searching for their patient on another floor of the hospital, with no luck. That is, until they stop near the nurses station to try calling him on his phone. A nurse overhears them talking about losing a patient, and she asks if he was wearing plaid and had a sling. When Griffith says yes, the nurse tells them that she saw him on the stairs, heading up to the roof. When they get there, Eddie is standing on the ledge, his white coat dangling from his good arm. Kwan tells him that they can release him to go home, to which Eddie says, “What if I didn’t go home?” Kwan tells Griffith that the headline “drunk med student falls off hospital” is way worse than losing him, and Griffith tells Kwan that his labs say he is completely sober. Then Eddie asks, “What if I just…let the wind decide?”

As they fly over the U.S., Meredith is pacing the length of the plane. Bailey is still in surgery, and she wishes she could see into the OR, so Richard reminds her that the last thing a surgeon needs is a mother watching over their shoulder — especially if that mother is Meredith Grey. She tells him that surgeons make mistakes all the time, listing off some of the ones that could happen with an appendectomy. He tells her that those things could happen, but most of the time, they don’t, to which she responds, “And most of the time, people who need craniotomies get head CTs.” Richard just looks at her, and Meredith realizes what she said. She tries to apologize and says, “I know it’s not Derek,” but Richard tells her she doesn’t need to apologize. He understands.

Back on the roof, Griffith is still talking to Eddie, trying to get him to come down from the ledge. Griffith approaches the ledge carefully, staying behind Eddie, and asks him if he came up to the roof to hurt himself. He tells her he doesn’t know, and when she asks if he’s having thoughts of suicide, he says, “I guess. Sometimes.” Griffith offers to talk and then asks him to sit down, which he does, though he continues to face out towards the street. As Griffith continues to talk to Eddie, she mouths to Kwan that he should text Bailey.