Executive producer Zoanne Clack talks us through some of the show’s most bizarre maladies.
If it’s rare and even ridiculous, the staff at Grey Sloan have treated it.
“We’re the 1 percent hospital,” jokes executive producer and emergency medicine residentZoanne Clack.
Ron Tom/ABC
“Fitting rare medical cases into the characters' stories is a total puzzle.”
Or we’ll make something up and then check that that it works with experts."
A lot of people will swallow paperclips and kniveswhich we did later with [an incarcerated woman].
ABC
Sothat’s what we came up withbecause it would be such a funny-looking X-ray."
“We also wanted to introduce the pain-management story line, withDerekbeing the doctor who dealt with it.
So we just pushed them together and had that happen.
ABC
We had two of our married writers be our models to make it less awkward.
There was a lot of modeling that went along with that.
It was fun to figure out.”
ABC
This one was one of the ones where my initial thought was, ‘Are you kidding me?
We can’t do this!’
But then I realized that a teratoma puts out the hormones that you make during pregnancy.
ABC
We tried to get it in a couple of episodes before it actually landed.
Making her this fearless person definitely helped with what was going on in the episode, story-arc-wise."
“It was also all about us wanting to use a bunch of surgeons all at once.
ABC
“It happens; the fish will follow the stream of urine into the penis.
We finally accomplished it!
It was in so many episodes before the one it ended up in, it was hilarious.”
ABC
“That was one that actually took a long time to research because it doesn’t really happen.
The main point of that was to get all of our characters together.
We actually use it as a framework for cases that we do now when we need everyone together.
ABC
“It was based on a real case.
It was really interesting because I really didn’t even understand how warts turn into that.
ABC
ABC
ABC
ABC
ABC
