Episode 4:
The Heart of the Matter

Air Date: 10/18/2007

After his admission that he slept with Izzie George is stunned when Callie says, "I forgive you." He tries to find Izzie to tell her the bad news, but Callie finds her first and, in front of a set of interns, orders Izzie to meet her in the cafeteria at noon.

Word quickly spreads through the hospital that Callie is going to fight Izzie in the cafeteria. Alex asks Izzie what she did to piss Callie off and, after making him swear not to tell another soul, confesses she slept with George. Alex walks away in disgust.

A woman comes in for a foot injury after slipping on her treadmill. She and her fiance -- for whom she was losing weight so that he would move in with her -- just want her foot fixed, but Callie tells her it won't be any good if she continues to starve herself and exercise obsessively. Miranda suspects something is wrong with Callie when she quietly agrees to just fix the foot and doesn't deliver a lecture to the patient or her boyfriend.

Derek asks Meredith to go away for "48 hours of sex," and she agrees, providing it's just sex. She starts to get second thoughts when she sees that he's on very friendly terms with Lexie. Cristina -- who is still calling Lexie by her intern number, "Three," despite Lexie's objections -- doesn't much like it either. She orders Lexie not to talk to patients and to stay by the wall. During a procedure where Derek is placing weights on an injured teenager to stabilize him, Lexie touches the boy's hand to comfort him. Cristina orders her out of the room since the slightest movement might permanently paralyze him.

Derek then snaps at Cristina for being "selfish" and says she won't be welcome in his surgeries anymore unless she starts actually teaching her interns. On her next surgery, she helps talk Lexie through a difficult procedure. She still calls her "Three," but now Lexie doesn't object.

Meredith asks Alex to swap shifts with her so she can go away with Derek. He agrees, but only if she takes his middle-aged intern, Norman, for the day. Meredith hands Norman the job of informing a woman she's dying. She advises him not to get too emotional. She comes in and finds the woman sobbing hysterically and Norma admits he did it wrong. But he's made an even bigger mistake: He informed the wrong patient! And now they have to find her because she's left the hospital. Norman brings her back, without having told her the truth yet, and she's ecstatic, saying she's going to make the most of her life: she quit her job and broke up with her boyfriend and plans to move to Iceland. When they tell her she's not dying, she is crushed. She leaves happy however, because the hospital is going to pay her enough to buy a "four-bedroom house in Iceland," Mark grimly tells Meredith.

Richard and Adele's teenage niece Camille, who has been fighting cancer for years, is brought in, unable to breathe. A cancerous mass has blocked her throat. She just wants to die, but her mother and Adele beg Richard to talk her into more treatment. She tells Richard she's just too tired and that she had hoped the blockage in her throat would have killed her already. Richard sadly tells Adele that he couldn't talk Camille into continuing treatment. Adele feels that Richard has failed her, once again.

Izzie prepares for her big showdown with Callie and when Callie enters, the cafeteria is packed. Izzie puts up her fists and Callie blinks; she didn't want to fight, just to talk. She turns her back on Izzie and walks away.

The woman with the ankle injury starts spitting up blood and they rush her into surgery: She has a bleeding ulcer from constantly popping ibuprofen. Because she was underweight and malnourished, her heart can't take it and she dies on the operating table. Callie finds the boyfriend outside and tells him that he's to blame for her death and that he couldn't have really loved her. Miranda and George stop her from actually hitting the man. George realizes she's talking about their marriage and Miranda tells Callie that the "nothing" going on with her has almost cost her her career.

Izzie and Callie and tries to apologize. Callie tells her it's bad enough that she humiliated her by sleeping with George, now she's humiliated her at work too. When Izzie tries to say that she "feels terrible," Callie replies, "Don't you dare come to me for forgiveness, you traitorous bitch."

George tells Callie that she can't forgive him for what he did and she finally admits that she hasn't forgiven him at all. She goes home to the hotel alone.

Alex is unsympathetic to Izzie when she falls apart after her day. She was the one who fell for a married man, after all. She says it's no different than his crush on Ava. He reminds her that she rebuffed him after Denny died, saying she "wasn't ready," and then she told him about George like he was "one of her chick friends." But when he hears her crying in her room that night he brings her a box of Kleenex, although he tells her to "keep it down."

Meredith is ready to go away with Derek, but he's changed his mind. He doesn't just want 48 hours with her, he says, he wants a lifetime. He wants to marry her and grow old with her and he knows that scares her. He says he'll wait until she's ready but he doesn't know what he'll do if he meets someone in the meantime who can give him what he wants right now.

- description by ABC.com

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