Grey’s Anatomy Review: (Don’t Fear) the Reaper (Season 14 Episode 11)

For a moment there, I thought it might just happen. I thought we might just lose Miranda Bailey.

On Grey’s Anatomy Season 14 Episode 11, “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper,” Bailey admits herself to another hospital when she believes she’s having a heart attack. It’s intense and emotional, and thank goodness, we get a happy ending.

But what’s so profound is the way that something so common is used to tell such an important story.

Grey’s Anatomy is great at shocking us with mass casualties and freak accidents, or even tumors that make a character see someone they’ve lost. But this is a heart attack, and if it weren’t for the fact that Bailey understood her body as well as she does, she might not have made it.

It seems simple enough at first. She understands her body, she walks into the hospital and tells them she’s having a heart attack. The problem is that the tests don’t add up, and the doctors are quick to assume what she’s actually experiencing is anxiety.

Bailey’s put in a position of having to advocate for herself as a patient. The sad thing is, as viewers, we can almost wonder if these doctors are right — if Bailey is actually dealing with anxiety instead.

It does make sense, considering everything that she’s been dealing with. But why on earth would the doctors not run that one extra test that she insists she needs? It’s infuriating, and it’s more relatable than one might think.

Without getting too personal, I’ll just say this — I’ve been there, in a less drastic and much less dangerous way, but I’ve been there. I’ve been in the position of knowing something about my own body and arguing with medical professionals that it needed to be addressed. When they finally listened, they were shocked to see that I was right.

There’s something to be said for having faith that you understand your own body, whether you’re a doctor or not.

For Bailey, this is complicated further by the fact that she doesn’t go to Grey-Sloan when she feels she needs help. She wants to keep it a secret because she doesn’t want the people working for her to see her as weak.

It’s frustrating, of course, because you can imagine that if she were in the care of her own colleagues and friends that they’d have run every test with no questions asked, but it makes complete sense that she wouldn’t want to be a patient at the hospital where she’s chief of surgery.

Ben, though — come on, Bailey. You should have had him there with you from the start.

I love that Richard goes right to the hospital when he realizes something’s wrong. Yes, the loudspeaker gives away Bailey’s location, but even if it hadn’t, something tells me he’d have wound up finding her.

The best part of all of us this is Bailey’s well-deserved spotlight. “(Don’t Fear) the Reaper” allows Chandra Wilson to shine in a fantastic way, and because the episode is focused entirely on her, it takes the time it needs to expand on all these different layers of her character. We see her fear, her strength, her drive, her confidence, her compassion — and on top of all of that, we see her learn something from the experience.

Bailey: Life is too precious to waste doing anything less than what makes us happy.

By the way, I’m breathing a sigh of relief over here that she and Ben are going to be okay. That he’s actually willing to give up on becoming a firefighter for her is telling, and it’s even more telling that she insists he move forward with it.

The flashbacks to a young Bailey are great, too. It’s amazing to me that even in its fourteenth season we can learn so much we didn’t already know about a character who has been on the show from the start.

Add to that the flashbacks to a Bailey we’ve seen — several moments throughout the series that have been so powerful for her, and you leave this episode appreciating her character so much more.

What did you think of this episode of Grey’s Anatomy? Share your thoughts with us in the comments below!

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Grey’s Anatomy airs Thursdays at 8/7c on ABC.

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