On Call | Grey's Anatomy // Book 3 // COMPLETED

71 | "Let's Get Married"

Infections have a nasty way of sneaking up on you. You're feeling pretty good, you think the infection's gone, and then it reappears out of nowhere when your body's still weak, when you've barely recovered...Bam. You're infected all over again. And once the infection spreads, once it gets into your bloodstream, well, then you really have to watch it. 'Cause that's the kind of infection that can kill you.

The past few days around the hospital had been hectic, to say the least. It seemed that whoever I worked with and wherever I went, tensions were high.

Bailey was angry at Warren because of the Gretchen situation. In the end, Bailey had decided to suspend Warren from the residency program for six months as his punishment, but instead, Warren just went around his wife's back and started logging more hours as an anesthesiologist again. He claimed it was because he didn't want to fall behind and because he was going crazy just sitting at home all day, and although those were perfectly logical reasons, Bailey saw it as a personal attack against her authority.

That's not where the bickering ended though, because Callie and Arizona were also going into it with each other. After finding out that Penny had won the Preminger Grant, Callie had decided to follow Penny to New York and live there with her. Problem was, Callie wanted to take Sophia with her too, and of course, Arizona was not having any of that. The two tried to work it out the best they could but in the end, there ended up being a court hearing in which a bunch of people from the hospital had to testify on both Callie and Arizona's behalf in order for the judge to make a decision about who to award full custody to. When all was said and done, Arizona ended up winning full custody; but just like people had kept saying, in custody battles, even if you win, you will still feel like you've lost something.

And then, of course, there was Owen and me who hadn't really talked at all since our fight. At the hospital, we only talked when it was about a patient and at home, we only talked to line up schedules when it came to taking care of Bear.

At this moment in time, everyone was a little messed up.

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"Owen, can you move to the side a little." I requested as I tried my best to get a visual on the torn spleen in front of me. "I just, I can't see what I'm doing."

Owen remained silent as he worked for a few seconds, almost like he was going to ignore me. "Yeah, just, uh, give me one second here." he finally responded.

It was just the two of us in this surgery. Of course, there were scrub nurses around and the anesthesiologist, but as for surgeons, it was just us. This was the first time we had really been 'alone' together in days and it was a tad uncomfortable to say the least. I hadn't exactly planned on being trapped in an O.R. alone with Owen for hours on end, but in a hospital, things rarely go exactly how you want them to.

I had been paged from one of my current patients' room that evening to attend to a family that had just been in a severe car crash. Originally it had been April and I working on the father, Owen and Maggie working on the mother, and Alex and Jo making sure the kids were okay even though they hadn't sustained any major injuries. However, just before it was time to take the father into surgery, April started feeling extremely nauseous due to being pregnant and Owen had stepped in instead, leaving Maggie to deal with the mother.

Pulling myself from my thoughts, I looked over and saw that Owen was still doing exactly what he had been doing minutes before. "Owen, please," I grumbled. "You've been trying to salvage that one kidney for like half an hour now. Can you please step aside so I can at least try to get this spleen fixed up?"

"Ellie, I'm almost done here." Owen retorted. "Just wait a few more minutes."

"The man can live without one kidney! He's got two!" I snapped, growing frustrated with the situation. "He's only got one spleen however and I'd love to not have to remove it and put this man at an elevated risk of infections later on down the road. I'm not asking anymore Owen, step aside!"