Tonight's episode of 'Grey's Anatomy,' entitled "Love Turns You Upside Down," forced the new batch of interns at Seattle Grace-Mercy West to step up their game, while dealing with difficult situations at the hospital.
The intern-centric episode shows as each intern is paired up with one of the attendings and deals with the challenges that come from each service.
Intern Jo Wilson (Camilla Luddington) and Dr. Alex Karev (Justin Chambers)
Intern Jo, who gets called "Princess" throughout the episode, is paired up with pediatrics attending Alex Karev. The Harvard/Princeton taught intern is thrust into a case involving a newborn baby and a fifteen-year-old mother who wants nothing to do with him. Without Karev's help, Jo is forced to intubate the newborn all by herself. With some encouragement from surrounding nurses, the surgical intern is able to successfully intubate the baby.
However, the baby is far from being out of the woods and teen mom could hardly care less. The young mother decides to abandon her baby at the hospital, pushing Jo over the edge and making her attack the teenage mother and her mother for abandoning the baby. Karev manages to rip her off, letting the mother-daughter pair leave the hospital.
Karev then learns that Jo was abandoned as a newborn by her own mother and that she was forced to navigate the foster care system her entire life. She is not the "princess" that everyone makes her out to be, after all.
Intern Shane Ross (Gaius Charles) and Dr. April Kepner (Sarah Drew)
Intern Shane rejoins the service of attending April Kepner with the hopes that he'll be able to "scrub in" to any surgeries she's performing. However, he gets roped in to April's "lumps and bumps" day, which involves treating a multitude of patients with warts, cyst, bumps and lumps. Despite not being glamorous, Shane learns how to treat patients like actual patients while working with April. He is also able to perform solo procedures, putting him ahead of his fellow interns.
Drs. Callie Torres (Sara Ramirez) and Jackson Avery (Jesse Williams) then pick Shane as the intern on Dr. Derek Shepherd's hand surgery after he displays great beside manners. He returns to April to help out for day two of "lumps and bumps" to thank her for teaching him how to treat patients.
Interns Stephanie Edwards (Jerrika Hinton) and Leah (Tessa Ferrer) and Dr. Christina Yang (Sandra Oh)
Interns Stephanie and Leah get picked for cardio attending Christina while they work on two newborn patients with heart defects and a woman who must be kept upside down to keep breathing. In typical Christina fashion, the heart surgeon encourages the two to be highly competitive for the chance to scrub in with her.
The two interns work hard to outdo each other, in both the cases with the baby and the older female patient. Stephanie becomes particularly attached to the two parents of her young patients. Christina invites her to scrub in with the babies, delegating Leah to other duties. However, the two take their competition too far and almost succeed in killing Christina's older patient. In return, Chief of Staff Owen Hunt (Kevin McKidd) bans them from surgery for a month.
Intern Heather Brooks (Tima Majorino) and Dr. Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo)
Although Intern Heather isn't delegated to any medical task, she is the intern faced with perhaps the hardest job-calling all of Derek's sisters at his wife's request to see which sister will donate a nerve for their brother's damaged hand. Heather is quickly sucked into Derek and Meredith's ongoing battle over his hand surgery.
While handling Meredith's phone, Heather not only finds out things about Derek but also finds out about Meredith's secret pregnancy. The stress over her difficult assignment bubbles right as Derek's sister Lizzy (Neve Campbell) shows up at the hospital.
'Grey's Anatomy' S9E9, "Run Baby Run," airs on Thursday, December 13 at 9 p.m. EST on ABC.
WATCH THE PROMO FOR "RUN BABY RUN"