For the First Time

It's Just the Beginning

I immediately ran out of the room and went down to the ER. The nursing home hadn't informed me of anything about my mother lately. The only thing that I knew was that she still has Alzheimers. The longer I was going over the worse case scenarios, the more I remembered. I hadn't seen my mother in 6 weeks, due to the fact that I had no days off. Anytime I was able to go at night, visiting hours were already over. I envied my mother on so many different levels, yet I was still upset with myself since I had not been keeping in touch.

"Where is she?" I asked the nurse at the front desk in the ER. She looked at me with a puzzled look like she had no clue who I was talking about. "Where is she? Ellis Grey, where the hell is she?"

"Oh, she's in trauma bay 1," the nurse said. I turned around and headed towards the trauma room. I looked around and saw that Derek was nowhere around, which was probably a good thing since my mother had a good sense for this kind of stuff. I took a deep breath before entering since I was anticipating the worst. I stepped into the trauma bay to find by surprise that mother was awake, and lucid.

"Mom?" I asked. Her head whipped around and a smile began to form. I saw Dr. Webber sitting at the end of her bed; I seemed to interrupt their conversation.

"Meredith!" my mother exclaimed whenever she saw me. I couldn't remember the last time she was this excited to see me. "Come here, sit down," she said as she motioned me to sit beside her. I looked down at Richard to find the smile on his face disappear. "Dr. Webber has been telling me how extraordinary you have been in your general surgery fellowship. I see your following in my footsteps." I shook my head and looked back down at Richard.

"She's lucid," he said to me in a hushed tone. My heartbeat escalated quickly. This had been the first time that my mother had been lucid since she had been diagnosed.

"Does she know?" I asked him. He shook his head subtly.

"What don't I know?" my mother chimed in. I was aware that she had no clue about her disease, nor did I ever want to tell her about it.

"It's time she knows, Meredith," Richard told me. I raised one eyebrow, hoping that he would start the conversation. "You have to be the one to tell her." I looked down at my trembling hands that sat in my lap trying to figure out how to put this in a way that didn't sound like this disease was going to eventually kill her.

"Mom," I started off saying with my voice trembling, "eight years ago you were diagnosed with Alzheimer's Disease. This is the first time you've been fully lucid in the past eight years. I, I, uhm put you in a nursing home eight years ago so you would be able to receive the best care possible and I..." I stopped. My face stung as if one million bees had come and attacked me. I was trying to process it all, trying to put it all into words for my mother, until she slapped me. I sat there holding the side of my face and Dr. Webber stood up.

"Ellis you need to calm down, Meredith was just doing what was best for you," he was trying to explain. My mother was not going to have any of it.

"No, no, no!" my mother screamed repeatedly. Tears began running down her face. I sat there and cried with her not because of my pain, but because of the pain I now see that I had put her through. Her tears began to slow and her heart monitor began to beep. I looked through my water filled eyes at the monitor and realized her pressure was dropping as well as her heartbeat. Dr. Webber yelled out the door and many doctors and nurses came flooding in. There was too much commotion for me so I stepped outside to find Derek waiting at the nurses station. He looked worried. I held the side of my face and began to cry again, and began feeling dizzy with every tear that fell.

"Meredith what happened? Mer?" Derek asked me. And from then on I had no clue what was going on around me, all I knew was that I was lying on the ground.

I woke up in a patient room. I had no IV in me, so I knew something too catastrophic couldn't have happened. My vision was blurred so I blinked a few times to find Derek sitting next to me, holding my hand.

"Hey," he said in his McDreamy voice. For the first time I was actually glad he was there. "The Chief told me that I was to keep an eye on you, and I gladly took him up on the offer."

"Thank you," I mouthed to Derek. My throat was dry and I reached for the cup of water sitting beside my bed. "What happened with my mother?" I questioned.

"Well, at first they thought it was a panic attack, but they think the panic attack saved her life. They ran a full body CT and found that there was a tumor on her liver. They took her into surgery about ten minutes ago," Derek explained.

"Do they think it's cancer?" I asked.

"Dr. Webber said he wasn't sure. He said whenever you got to feeling better you were to go wait in the OR waiting room. He doesn't want you up in the gallery," Derek said. "If you're ready I'll go with you." I looked over at the clock and saw that it was 6:45.

"Crap, my appendectomy," I said.

"Dr. Bailey is taking care of it, you don't need to worry about it," Derek said. He was so reassuring. I began to get up from the bed and he took my hand. I was a little unstable at first but Derek helped me keep my balance. "Here," he said giving me a large styrofoam cup. "I went down and got this from the cafeteria. The ladies said all you ever drink is water and coffee and I figured coffee wouldn't be the best choice."

"You're the best," I said taking a large drink from the cup. The cafeteria ladies knew how I liked my drinks, filled to the brim with ice chips. We slowly made our way down to the waiting room and sat in the chairs. You never realize how uncomfortable these chairs are until you're the ones sitting in them. Derek just being there was enough to keep me feeling comfortable. We sat in silence, until I broke it.

"You know, whenever I got paged about my mother, and we were alone in that patient room, all I could think about what I was about to see. I figured it would be gruesome and by the time I would get down there she would already be on her death bed. And then I thought, you know, it wouldn't be so bad if she was on her death bed. There wouldn't be anymore questions about my mother to answer, no one would compare me to her because they would think it would bother me, I wouldn't get anymore phone calls in the middle of the night that she was acting up again. There would be know of that in my life anymore. I always say I want to focus on my work and only my work. But the longer I thought about her being gone, the more I thought about how easy my life would be. She was never a mother to me and no one saw that but me," I said. I looked up at Derek who was listening so intently.

"Meredith..." he said before I cut him off.

"Not many people know this but she tried to kill herself. She tried to kill herself right in front of me when I was little. Sometimes I ask myself why I even bothered to call 911. Looking back if I would've known that this was going to be the way her life turned out, I would have never done it. I would have never called because she never wanted to live like this. Does that make me a bad human being?" I asked with tear welling up in my eyes. "Does that make me the worse daughter in this world?" Derek sat there and put his arm around me in hopes of comforting me. "Nobody realized that I've had no one for the past eight years, Derek. And if she dies, it's going to be like losing someone I never knew."

Derek sat there putting both arms around me and gave me a hug. He took his hand and turned my tear filled face towards him. He gave me a soft kiss on the lips not caring who saw and went back to comforting me. The longer we sat there, the harder I cried until I fell asleep.

I don't know how long I had been asleep but I had heard footsteps coming towards us. I kept my eyes closed. I shifted positions a little bit to find that Derek still had his arms around me.

"I don't want to wake her if it's bad news," Derek said in a hushed tone.

"Wake her," Dr. Webber said. And before I knew it, I felt Derek's warm breath enter my ear encouraging me to get up to face the aftermath.