(no subject)
Cristina is a person with plans. She makes plans, and she acts according to them. They're not always awfully detailed -- at first, they're often nothing more than an end goal, and the route to getting there is devised as she goes along. So it might be more accurate to say that Cristina is a person with goals. Very clear, very specific goals, which she will do anything in order to achieve.
Her current goal for the near future is to get on Hahn's good side, so that she can accomplish her slightly farther down the line goal of specializing in cardiothoracics and kicking total ass in it -- which would really not be nearly as complicated, if only the Head of Cardio didn't hate her guts. Her goal for the immediate future, though, is to convince Bailey to let her do sutures on the guy whose intestines are currently hanging out of his body as he lies on the stretcher, with the two of them, Alex (who's got no way in hell of getting her sutures), and the Chief working to fix the damage caused to his insides by a very pissed off mother bear before putting them back into his body.
The reason she needs to do those sutures is because every suture is worth a point, and the guy needs several hundred of them. She needs points in order to accomplish what's been her main goal for the last two weeks -- winning the contest. Bailey declared a contest, which will be ending tonight, and the winner gets a prize. And even though none of them know what it is, they all know they need it. Unfortunately for the rest of them, though, they're not going to get it, because Cristina's winning. Like she always does.
And she's definitely not going to let Alex get ahead of her by spending the afternoon doing sutures. Sutures that she can be doing.
Here's the thing with plans. They don't always go the way they should. You don't always get what you want out of them. It's a fact of life, one that Cristina has come to accept long ago, albeit reluctantly -- because she's fully convinced that if everything went the way she planned for it to, everything would go right. That's just the way Cristina does things -- right.
She's tough as hell, though. Got rock-solid skin, untouchable, the kind everyone else in her residency year wishes they could have. So when things don't go as planned, she deals. Her dad died when she was nine. She got accidentally pregnant, and lost the baby and her fallopian tube before she could even abort. Her fiance walked out on her on their wedding day, and the new cardio surgeon at the hospital refuses to do her damn job and teach her. Those things happen, and Cristina deals. Usually with much less alcohol, it's worth noting, than Meredith requires in order to deal with things.
Some things, though, aren't handled that simply. Some things you just can't bury in the back of your head and stock a hundred other thoughts over until they're practically (almost) gone. Some things, while rare and in-between, even Cristina doesn't know how to handle.
Some things like finding herself standing in the middle of a beach, sun blazing into her eyes and her bloody, gloved hands hanging in the air where mere seconds ago were the patients' insides.
And Cristina doesn't move, because her brilliant scientist brain cannot even begin to wrap itself around this. Because moments ago, she was in the OR, and now-- now she's not. She's alone, someplace where it's sandy and sunny and hot, and it's definitely, definitely not even in Seattle.
And those things don't happen. Not unless she's gone crazy, which she hasn't, because she's never been anything but perfectly stable and sane -- she's the one who analyzes Meredith's psychological issues, and she's definitely never been known to hallucinate entire scenarios like this, and God, is it sunny, she can barely see anything. Like everything in front of her is constantly going in and out of focus before she can register it at all.
So Cristina stands there. Just stands there, and squints.
Her current goal for the near future is to get on Hahn's good side, so that she can accomplish her slightly farther down the line goal of specializing in cardiothoracics and kicking total ass in it -- which would really not be nearly as complicated, if only the Head of Cardio didn't hate her guts. Her goal for the immediate future, though, is to convince Bailey to let her do sutures on the guy whose intestines are currently hanging out of his body as he lies on the stretcher, with the two of them, Alex (who's got no way in hell of getting her sutures), and the Chief working to fix the damage caused to his insides by a very pissed off mother bear before putting them back into his body.
The reason she needs to do those sutures is because every suture is worth a point, and the guy needs several hundred of them. She needs points in order to accomplish what's been her main goal for the last two weeks -- winning the contest. Bailey declared a contest, which will be ending tonight, and the winner gets a prize. And even though none of them know what it is, they all know they need it. Unfortunately for the rest of them, though, they're not going to get it, because Cristina's winning. Like she always does.
And she's definitely not going to let Alex get ahead of her by spending the afternoon doing sutures. Sutures that she can be doing.
Here's the thing with plans. They don't always go the way they should. You don't always get what you want out of them. It's a fact of life, one that Cristina has come to accept long ago, albeit reluctantly -- because she's fully convinced that if everything went the way she planned for it to, everything would go right. That's just the way Cristina does things -- right.
She's tough as hell, though. Got rock-solid skin, untouchable, the kind everyone else in her residency year wishes they could have. So when things don't go as planned, she deals. Her dad died when she was nine. She got accidentally pregnant, and lost the baby and her fallopian tube before she could even abort. Her fiance walked out on her on their wedding day, and the new cardio surgeon at the hospital refuses to do her damn job and teach her. Those things happen, and Cristina deals. Usually with much less alcohol, it's worth noting, than Meredith requires in order to deal with things.
Some things, though, aren't handled that simply. Some things you just can't bury in the back of your head and stock a hundred other thoughts over until they're practically (almost) gone. Some things, while rare and in-between, even Cristina doesn't know how to handle.
Some things like finding herself standing in the middle of a beach, sun blazing into her eyes and her bloody, gloved hands hanging in the air where mere seconds ago were the patients' insides.
And Cristina doesn't move, because her brilliant scientist brain cannot even begin to wrap itself around this. Because moments ago, she was in the OR, and now-- now she's not. She's alone, someplace where it's sandy and sunny and hot, and it's definitely, definitely not even in Seattle.
And those things don't happen. Not unless she's gone crazy, which she hasn't, because she's never been anything but perfectly stable and sane -- she's the one who analyzes Meredith's psychological issues, and she's definitely never been known to hallucinate entire scenarios like this, and God, is it sunny, she can barely see anything. Like everything in front of her is constantly going in and out of focus before she can register it at all.
So Cristina stands there. Just stands there, and squints.