‘Grey’s Anatomy’ Season 14, Episode 11 Recap: Bailey Faces Heart Attack

This week on Grey’s Anatomy, the fate of one of the show’s most popular doctors hung in the balance – Dr. Miranda Bailey found herself checked into the hospital.

GREY’S ANAYOMY RECAP

“On your deathbed, no one wishes they’d worked more,” Bailey says in voice-over as the episode begins. She and her husband Ben drive Tuck to school and drop him, and the tension is clear when the son leaves that Bailey and Ben are still at odds over his decision to become a firefighter. She tells him to drop her off at Seattle Presbyterian Hospital for an appointment, but once she gets in she says, “My name is Miranda Bailey. I am Chief of Surgery at Grey Sloan Memorial, and I believe that I am having a heart attack.”

The doctors at Seattle Presbyterian are sadly incompetent, and even their head of cardio, Dr. Larry, is dismissive. Bailey schools the doc, as she does, on the difference in symptoms of heart attacks in men and women, but he still won’t order any tests she’s requested.

The show then takes us through some flashbacks of Bailey’s childhood to determine exactly why she is so opposed to reckless behavior. Her mother constantly smothered her and worried so much that she even insisted on her daughter using training wheels on her bike when she was a junior in high school. When she was older, her father finally revealed that they had had another daughter before her who only lived for two months. This also explains Bailey’s sudden susceptibility to OCD in season 9.

In an effort to disprove Bailey’s claim of a heart attack, the first doctor brings in a second arrogant doctor, this time a psychologist, who then examines her “history of mental illness” and “apparent lack of a support system” to explain away her symptoms. She responds with statistics from the CDC that 70% of women who die of coronary heart disease show no pervious signs or symptoms, and that African Americans are more at risk than other groups.

Again, neither male doctor will listen to reason and help out everyone’s favorite doctor. So she calls Maggie with instructions not to tell anyone but to meet her at Seattle Presbyterian. By the time she arrives, Webber is already there based on his own suspicions about Bailey not showing up to work that day. They walk in to find Bailey helping save the life of a patient in the bed next to her who coded, and the doctors at the hospital apparently couldn’t be bothered. Once she finishes, Bailey collapses onto the floor.

Maggie then lets the first doctor have it, yelling and telling him what’s what. She and Webber try to get Bailey to call Ben and to transfer to Grey Sloan Memorial, but she refuses. “It’s taken me way too long to feel tall there, and I’m not going to let a blocked artery take me down a peg,” she says.

Maggie then takes it upon herself to make sure that Bailey receives the best care possible. As a cardiothoracic surgeon, Maggie knows all the procedures Bailey needs, but Larry won’t allow her to help, even though he himself doesn’t know. It takes some calm words from another man, Webber, to convince Larry that Maggie knows what she’s doing and that she can scrub in.

Bailey finally requests to call Ben, and then the show jumps into a series of flashbacks about their relationship, from their first date to his marriage proposal, as well as other high-stress Grey’s Anatomy moments, like when George (RIP) helped deliver her baby. We see Ben get the call and run to the hospital as Bailey goes under the knife. Webber takes Ben aside and explains that the fear he felt for Bailey is the fear Bailey feels for his life everyday of his firefighting career.

When Bailey wakes up, Ben chastises her for not telling him how she was feeling, and announces that he is quitting firefighter training. But Bailey, remembering her overprotective mother, tells him to continue: “Life is too precious to waste doing anything less than what makes us happy.”