Grey’s Anatomy 14×03: “Go Big or Go Home” Review

The voice-over for the episode tells us that surgeons are not gods — they are regular people. They don’t always know what they are doing. They have flaws and anxieties and their houses are sometimes a mess. We patients want to believe they’ve got it all together though.

Based off of DeLuca’s dialogue, we learn that it’s been a week since Amelia found out about her tumor. At home, Meredith complains to Zola about Alex’s mess around her house.

Jackson removes Megan’s stitches. He says the pain she feels is a good sign because it means her nerves are regenerating and accepting the transplant. Bailey walks in, telling Jackson to get to the lobby for when his grandfather arrives. Megan gets a call from Farouk, and she tells him ‘guess who’s coming home soon,’ throwing a smug look Owen’s way.

Bailey anxiously awaits Harper Avery’s arrival, trying to make everything in the hospital perfect. Passing by a room with a woman in labor, Bailey closes the door to decrease the unpleasant sounds.

Riggs asks Meredith about the biopsy she ran on Megan yesterday. She coldly says she can’t discuss her patient with him, and that he needs to ask the family. After he walks away, Maggie asks her sister what’s the dealio, but Mer doesn’t bother.

Riggs joins his group of residents while checking in on the patient, Walter Carr. He’s 64 and has a 24 inch blood clot. Riggs says that Maggie has planned an open thromboembolectomy. Everyone leaves the room and Meredith walks in to briefly speak with her old therapist from when she was brutally attacked by a patient in season 12.

Arizona gushes to April about how good the sex with DeLuca’s sister (who we now know is named Carina) has been. Any pain she had felt over Eliza is now gone.

As Catherine and Harper Avery walk down the hall, Bailey and the department heads (excluding Meredith and Amelia) overhear him complaining about the $15.8 million dollars of repairs the hospital needed. Harper Avery interrupts Baileys introduction and refers to her as ‘Bingy.’ He’s annoyed by the ‘window dressing’ happening, and tells the doctors to get back to work.

Amelia brings in Tom Koracick who is head of neurology at Hopkins for a consult on her tumor. He was the best teacher she ever had. He says that she shouldn’t be operating or coming up with surgical plans right now because the impulse control and decision making portion of her brain is all tumor at this point.

Bailey, Catherine, Jackson and Harper Avery sit down for a meeting. Harper tells his grandson that this is for the grown ups only. Jackson holds the majority vote of the board, so he says that he will be staying to hear Harper’s concerns. Amelia tries to talk to Bailey (presumably about her tumor) but Bailey, being busy, tells her to speak with Webber.

Walter Carr asks Meredith about her child’s birthday party and is happy to hear that things are well with Meredith. She says, however, that she can’t seem to shake this mood she is in.

Amelia shows her scans to Webber, and he asks if Owen, Meredith or Maggie know yet, which they don’t. He then asks Dr. Koracick how long he thinks this tumor has been growing. It’s likely been ten years. Dr. Koracick requests that Amelia not be allowed near any patients until she is tumor-free. He brings up Dr. Nicole Herman, who had had an inoperable tumor. Amelia had saved her life, but permanently blinded her.

Arizona checks on a patient who is still only four centimeters dilated, despite her water breaking hours ago. When Ben walks in, Arizona asks him to keep monitoring Marnie on her behalf. Hearing the mother cry out in pain repeatedly, he asks if she skipped the epidural. We learn that during Marnie had an epidural during her last delivery, and her BP dropped so low she almost arrested, so they’re not even considering an epidural this time.

Alex pages Jo for an incoming peds trauma. The two meet in the elevator, and as soon as the doors close, they start making out. Outside, they meet up with the EMT and the injured teenage boy. Long story short, an elaborate homecoming proposal went terribly wrong.

Owen vents to his sister about Amelia and how she doesn’t seem to care about their marriage but she still wears her wedding ring. Megan gives him a stern look and then lists off her many serious problems, from medical to her love life to the fact that her son is stuck in Iraq. She beats him at cards and then says she needs to get out of this room.

DeLuca brings Maggie into the room with all of Amelia’s scans and pretends to want to talk about the way their relationship ended. He keeps trying to give hints for Maggie to look at the scans and realize that they are Amelia’s, but Maggie actually talks about the given prompt.

Meredith talks to Walter Carr about how supportive she was when they found out that Megan was alive. She made it easy for Riggs to go back to his love, and never meant for there to be any kind of love triangle. Maggie and Riggs walk in as Walter’s doctors and ask if Meredith is also consulting on this case. Walter says that they are old friends and that she may stay to hear the update. They want to use the Angio-Vac on him instead of cutting open his chest. It’s like a vacuum that they’ll attach to his blood vessels to suck the clot out.

Dr. Koracick doesn’t understand how no one noticed the symptoms of Amelia’s brain tumor sooner, but we all just thought that was her personality. Amelia asks DeLuca to pull old case files for her, but Koracick says that DeLuca is now his resident.

As April, Jo, and Alex work on Pete in an examination room off the ER, the girl Pete was asking to homecoming comes in to check on him. April tells the girl, Jamie, that they’ll update her as soon as they can.

Webber brings Amelia a scan of his old brain tumor that Derek had removed. He says that he knows how hard it is to go through this. His tumor was so tiny that Amelia thinks she’s looking at a post-op scan. She zooms in to see the tumor, and then points to her own. “That’s a tumor.”

Meredith talks to Riggs and Maggie defensively about them operating on Walter. However, with Walter’s age, the cardio surgeons believe this is the safest and most logical option. Meredith walks back to Walter’s room to admit that her feelings for Riggs these days is more of a rage. He tells Meredith to sit down and talk about it. She asks if that’s really how he wants to be spending his time. He could possibly die in surgery. He poses the question back to Meredith: “If you could have a scalpel in your hand at the end of your life, would you want to?”

Carina and DeLuca walk up to where Arizona is talking with Webber. As they greet each other, Ben walks up to update Arizona that the mother is still only at four centimeters. Carina asks if they’ve tried oxytocin. Arizona tells her that the mother is allergic to the ingredients, but Carina means natural oxytocin that the body produces with female stimulation, which makes everyone uncomfortable. Arizona assures Ben that they’ll figure something else out.

Harper Avery continues to complain about the way this hospital is spending money, including Megan’s abdominal wall transplant. They describe her as a military hero, but he is uninterested.

Webber finds Amelia sitting on the floor, looking at files of patients whose lives she has ended or ruined. She plans on contacting the other hospitals she has worked for, but Webber tells her to let him look at the files first. He concludes that Amelia’s mortality rate for her patients since she started working at Grey Sloan is a 0.9%. For comparison, he says that Derek’s was a 1.3%, meaning she has been even more successful than her tumor-free older brother. He tells her that she didn’t hurt these people, but that she is hurting the ones who love her by not letting them stand by her through this.

Arizona tells the mother in labor that it may be time to start considering a c-section, but the mother is completely uninterested, since that would involve more medication and she almost died during her last delivery. They’re desperate for a new idea.

In surgery for the teenage boy, Alex spectacles that people shouldn’t ask big questions unless they already know the answer. The doctors discuss their school dances while making fun of April for how perfect her homecoming night probably was.

Walter asks Meredith why she chose Riggs in the first place. He pursued her, and eventually she gave in, but more importantly, it was that he understood her pain. She says that she’s so angry with Riggs because she made herself very clear with Megan that she and Riggs were over, and then Riggs made her look like a liar. Walter thinks the anger is from jealousy, but before they can discuss further, he is thrown into intense pain.

Harper Avery concludes their meeting by stating that Grey Sloan is a financial drain. He doesn’t want the foundation name attached to it, so he is pulling the funding. Bailey panics but comes up with a different view: the hospital was remodeled after Stephanie set a fire in order to save a child from being kidnapped. That story has been all over the news. Pulling funding from a hospital with positive press coverage from a story like that could cause a PR nightmare for the foundation. He can’t argue with her point, but he can fire Bailey, which is what he does.

As Megan and Owen walk around the hospital as part of her recovery, Megan says she wants Riggs to be with Meredith because Megan had been kept from the people she loved for the past decade, and she doesn’t want to do that to someone else. Megan expresses how she just wants to get back to her son. Her brother reminds her that if she rushes recovery, her wound will get infected, which could cause her death, which would leave Farouk without her forever.

Jamie admits to April that she probably was going to say no to Pete. Since the incident, she has gotten friend requests from a bunch of seniors who were previously out of her league. She’s considering going with a guy named Rick, but April says that when a guy crashes a hot balloon for you, you pick that guy.

Carina smugly notices that Arizona must have followed her previous advice when she hears the sounds coming from the hospital room sounding more pleasurable than painful. Arizona doesn’t want to admit it and doubts that it will even work. Carina ponders why Americans are such prudes. She says some suggestive things to Arizona, and then the father comes out of the room, saying that his wife is crowning.

Amelia shows Maggie the scans of her brain. At first, Maggie assumes the scans are her patient’s, but Amelia clarifies. When Maggie tears up, Amelia tells her not to cry. Since Maggie’s mother just died of cancer last season, Maggie says she has the right to cry. Amelia assures her that this is fixable. Trying to lighten the mood, she says, “Come on. It’s kind of hilarious. I’m a brain surgeon and I got a brain tumor.” She asks for Maggie’s help telling Owen, and says that Maggie will have to tell Meredith. Meredith has been calling Amelia crazy for years, and Amelia hates that this makes her kind of right.

Catherine talks to Bailey in the hall, essentially saying that she will fix this mess with Harper firing Bailey, but in her own time. Bailey said she can’t wait and do it Catherine’s way. She rushes back into the boardroom to try to change Harper Avery’s mind, but they find him ‘sleeping.’ Yep, you guessed it. He isn’t actually sleeping. He’s dead. Catherine calls down the hall for a gurney and crash cart.

After his body is taken away, Jackson asks if they know what happened. It appears to be a stroke or cardiac arrest. Bailey comments on how she doesn’t even work here anymore. Jackson asks what she’s talking about, so they fill him in.

Jackson: “Well, he can’t do that.”

Bailey: “Well, he did.”

Jackson: “Well, he can’t do that anymore.”

Later, Jackson, Catherine and Bailey give a eulogy to the staff, changing his opinions on this hospital. Jackson makes sure to refer to Bailey as their chief so that Bailey knows she still has her job.

Meredith is in Walter’s room when he wakes up post-op. She slides his wedding ring back on his finger. They had had to remove it for surgery.

Meredith confronts Riggs about her anger with him. She says that they both had the same dream of their loved one returning, but Riggs’s actually came true and he’s wasting it. She wants him to fight for Megan. He says that he’s in love with Meredith, and he wasn’t going to lie to Megan about it. Meredith says that Megan knows that life is messy and she doesn’t need the lie. He should fight for her anyway.

After their shift, Jo waits outside for Alex with a sign that says ‘Homecoming?’ Alex asks if she’s asking him to the dance, but she’s asking him to come home.

Post-op, Jamie brings Pete a ‘get well soon’ balloon.

Amelia pages Owen to the hospital so she can break the news of her tumor. He walks in, angry at the way she’s been lately. She says she needs to talk to him, and he feels that it’s always about what she needs. Mid-rant, he glances up and notices ‘Shepherd, A.’ on the top of the scans.

Maggie does her part and tells Meredith. We see a montage of Amelia checking into the hospital. She puts on a hospital gown, has blood drawn, and lies in bed. Meredith silently walks in and lies on the bed next to her sister-in-law.

Amelia had better be okay, Grey’s. You already took two neuro baes from us (Derek, Stephanie), and we won’t stand for this. Catch Grey’s Anatomy Thursdays on ABC as part of TGIT, and check in weekly for our recaps here at TGON!