I’d never related so deeply to a TV character until Nina Sullivan (Bess Rous) appeared on Season 15 of “Grey’s Anatomy.”
“Unfortunately, we’ve exhausted every test that we can think of,” Dr. Miranda Bailey (Chandra Wilson) told Nina. “We’ve run out of tests.”
“Then find me a test. I can’t keep living like this. I can’t keep being told it’s in my head when I know that it’s not. I can’t keep being told that I’m crazy when I’m not crazy,” Nina responded.
As I watched Nina plead for medical help, trying to convince doctors her words held true, it was as if I were watching my own nightmare replay before me. For more than a decade, I was told I was exaggerating, that my condition was undiagnosable, and that I looked healthy and capable despite the way I felt. My words didn’t matter anymore because each time I sat in an exam room, relaying my medical history and begging for help, I ended up in the same place: undiagnosed ― struggling to walk and alone.
Approximately 30 million Americans experience significant health problems that defy diagnosis. Undiagnosed patients are often met with resistance when lab work continuously fails to reveal an answer. Without a physician leading them, these patients push onward alone and without the guidance they so desperately need.
Having a physician like Bailey could mean the difference between access to treatment or letting a progressive disease cause irreversible damage. Bailey, with Dr. Jo Wilson’s (Camilla Luddington) help, solved Nina’s medical mystery after she’d been gaslighted repeatedly. Every undiagnosed patient needs a physician like Bailey, so they, too, can have another chance to live.
I remember lying lifeless on the hallway floor as my body surrendered to the mysterious disease depleting my strength. I received a diagnosis only after fighting for one. After 13 years, I met a neurologist who listened wholly, and a lumbar puncture finally revealed that I’d been living with multiple sclerosis for more than a decade. On treatment for six years now, my strength has improved, and I feel alive again. Like Bailey did for Nina, my neurologist gave me a second chance.
I also saw myself in patient Alicia Tatum (Rachel Nicks) in Season 6. In a flashback to 2003, Bailey was portrayed as an intern. During Alicia’s initial surgery, the team discovered gallstones, and Dr. Nicole Baylow, Bailey’s supervisor, was quick to blame the finding on a fatty diet. Bailey, having taken the patient’s full medical history, alerted her colleagues that Alicia was vegan, making her diet an unlikely culprit. A month later, after the team failed to provide an accurate diagnosis, Bailey diagnosed Alicia with appendicitis. As an undiagnosed patient, I needed a doctor to pay attention to details — to listen — and to believe my words were the key to an answer.
Often, when I cried, doctors considered my emotional reaction reason to suspect my physical complaints were psychosomatic. Doctors chose to see my fear instead of hearing that my legs weakened upon walking, that pain radiated down my outer thighs, and that involuntary muscle movements occurred without warning. They focused on my anxiety and my tears. Bailey does just the opposite: She reacts with compassion and doesn’t let her patients’ emotions cloud her judgment.
In Season 6, Amber (Austin Highsmith), a burn victim, was told to remain optimistic. But Bailey gave her permission to cry because she understands that tears are a natural reaction to underlying health issues, not a psychosomatic response to imaginative ailments. I learned to hide my emotions for fear of being judged unfairly, but Bailey lets her patients process grief without judgment.
At the end of Season 6, Bailey and Mary Portman (Mandy Moore) survived a mass shooting together. In Season 7, Mary died unexpectedly during a simple procedure, and Bailey wouldn’t give up without understanding why.
“Science is failing me. That I take personally. That I can’t accept,” she asserts.
Bailey’s commitment to her patients motivates her to assist the pathologist after Mary’s inconclusive autopsy. If every undiagnosed patient had a doctor unwilling to give up without an answer, the status of the undiagnosed patient wouldn’t be as common as it is.
In Season 10, Bailey met Braden Morris (Armani Jackson), a child with an immune deficiency, extremely vulnerable to germs. Through research, Bailey discovered a way to inactivate the HIV virus and use it to deliver a treatment to repair immune system function. When Braden’s parents refused treatment, Bailey administered the virus without consent, knowing it was his only chance of survival.
“He was dying, and I created something out of thin air. I took a virus that kills into something that heals, and I saved his life,” Bailey explained to her husband. Saving Braden’s life was Bailey’s top priority because she treats her pediatric patients the way she’d want her own child treated. It’s another quality that makes her an exceptional doctor.
Bailey is not only the kind of doctor unwilling to give up on her patients, but she also aspires to shape residents into doctors to do the same. In Season 11, Wilson apologized for crying following a patient’s death.
“Don’t you apologize for caring about your patients. A lot of doctors aren’t willing to go all in. It hurts too much. But that’s what’s gonna make you such an excellent doctor,” Bailey responded.
I needed a doctor willing to go all in for 13 years; I searched for a physician like Bailey.
In Season 13, Bailey acknowledges that she made a mistake pushing Dr. Richard Webber (James Pickens Jr.) aside and hiring Dr. Eliza Minnick (Marika Domińcyk) to teach the residents. She realized there was more to education than following protocols.
“This is not some factory that turns out surgical robots,” Bailey says. “We make doctors. Thinking, feeling, human doctors, and we will teach them right.” If every residency program had a leader determined to shape the next generation of physicians into empathetic, humane practitioners, every undiagnosed patient would have the doctor they need.
Bailey finds herself on the other side of the doctor-patient equation in Season 14. Knowing the signs of a heart attack in women and recognizing them in herself, she checked in to a neighboring emergency room. In a scenario far too familiar to my own, multiple health care providers tried to convince Bailey that her symptoms were psychosomatic, but she urged them to continue the work-up. Then, in response, Dr. Maggie Pierce (Kelly McCreary) expressed her disgust over the resistance many women face in health care settings.
“I am furious,” she says. “And I am grateful that Bailey fought for herself like she does for her patients every single day. And I am furious that she even had to.”
For more than a decade, I fought for myself, too.
For every doctor who didn’t believe me or gave up before reaching a diagnosis, Bailey is a reminder that compassionate physicians exist. She gives every patient on a long diagnostic journey hope that the doctor who will deliver an answer is on the horizon. She sets a prime example for every physician currently caring for a patient with a mysterious disease. “Grey’s Anatomy” has provided the undiagnosed community with a model of everything to look for in a doctor.
If every patient living with an undiagnosed disease had a physician like Bailey, the health care setting would be more approachable for patients in search of an answer — and many of the 30 million Americans currently living without a diagnosis could be given a second chance to live.