In a continuation of the previous episode, this week on Grey's Anatomy we saw that everything can change literally overnight. Just a day out from the accident that landed two parents and their son in the Emergency Room, Owen Hunt was still intensely managing their care while continuing to run a thriving trauma department and surgical service.
At Owen's urging, the surgeons played host to a pair of Syrian general practitioners to provide them basic surgical training. As medical concerns in their country grew more dire, these doctors were being forced to staff field hospitals, a practice with which Owen was exceedingly familiar from his army days. He endeavored to provide these dedicated doctors with the tools to step into their expanding professional roles and encouraged his team to think outside the surgical box to create procedures that could be accomplished with few supplies in the field.
Throughout this busy professional day Owen remained intent on providing stability for the child of two people who were injured in the previous day's accident. His reactions in that situation grew evermore confounding to his regained partner, Cristina Yang. In between seeking updates from Cristina, who continued to treat the child's father, and Derek Shepherd, who had operated on the mother, Owen attempted to give the child information that would calm him as his stress mounted without his parents to rely upon. Owen's ultimate solution was to try to keep the child at the hospital by admitting him rather than send him off-site with social services until his grandmother could fly into town.
While Cristina asserted her post-operative plan for her patient, she found herself keenly aware that Owen was focused almost to the point of distraction on her patient's recovery. As a result, Cristina's focus transitioned throughout the day between patient care and Owen's emotional responses. She stated her case against involving her department chair in routine patient care yet acceded to Owen's request and consulted her supervisor for other treatment options. Cristina's emotional intensity was aroused when Owen further admonished her for not seeking his own advice about further treatment for her patient. In trying to understand Owen's emotional reactivity she pondered possible answers, including wondering if he was tired of the administrative nature of being Chief of Surgery and missed the practice of medicine.
Into the midst of Cristina's thought process about what was going on with Owen landed news that Meredith Grey's genome mapping showed she carried the genetic markers for Alzheimer's disease. The two friends talked throughout the day about Meredith's need to develop a plan for tending to her children should she develop symptoms and her unwillingness to put her family through a lengthy bout of what she herself experienced in watching her mother suffer from the disease. By the end of her own emotional day, Cristina had sussed out Owen's reactions as having to do with helping their patients' child feel safe while his parents' health remained up in the air. This realization left her thoughtful as she watched Owen settle the child into a hospital room for the night.
Elsewhere in the hospital: Three patients developed post-operative infections which were traced back to Miranda Bailey having treated each patient; Derek and Meredith plotted their course with the health information they now possessed; Callie Torres wondered about next steps for her cartilage research; Jackson Avery further tried to find balance between surgical and administrative work; April Kepner worked with the Syrian doctors while trying to figure out if things were developing inappropriately with her EMT boyfriend; Richard Webber took both Bailey and Jackson under his wing; and the interns kept jostling for their footing as they stepped further into their education at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital.