Catherine's Cancer Storyline Was Extremely Personal For One Grey's Anatomy Writer

When Grey's Anatomy goes there, it really goes there. Thursday's episode took a break from the soapy dramatics and instead focused on telling an intimate story about what it really means to deal with cancer.

In "The Winner Takes It All," Koracick (Greg Germann) and Amelia (Caterina Scorsone) faced a daunting surgery to remove a tumor lodged on Catherine's (Debbie Allen) spine in the hopes of saving both her life and her surgeon's hands. They were successful in preserving her life and career but were unable to fully cure her. With 95 percent of the tumor removed, Catherine will now live with the disease for the rest of her life. It was a moving story with a hopeful ending as Catherine looked forward to all of the things she'll still be able to do, including spending time with her family.

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Elsewhere, the harrowing hour offered a different perspective through Thatcher Grey (Jeff Perry), who chose to stop treatments and die on his own terms. In an emotional final visit, Meredith (Ellen Pompeo) and her father hashed out their issues and found closure before he ultimately passed away.

The standalone episode was deeply personal for Grey's writer Elisabeth Finch. She based Catherine's story arc on her own experiences with cancer. In an interview with TV Guide, she opened up about what it meant to tell that very raw story, what Catherine's future might look like and the things she'd like to see changed with regard to how we handle the disease.

This was a deeply personal story for you, so what was it like putting yourself out there like that? Elisabeth Finch: This is my fifth season working on Grey's. Everyone, including the writers and the actors, has seen the various stages of me being sick, so it wasn't about me exposing myself to the people around me. What was challenging to me was figuring out how I could communicate the things that mattered most to me about my cancer experience, which is atypical, out into the world. And figure out how to give Catherine a character arc that was engaging and unique.

Which was the most difficult scene for you to write?
Finch: Honestly, I go somewhere in my head where I'm not thinking about it. But when we started filming, it started to filter into my brain how much of my story I put down on paper, how much of my story was being told through Catherine. Watching Catherine wake up and everyone else in the room is heartbroken and she finds out that they got 95 percent of the tumor and her hands still function and she can still be a surgeon, she starts to list all the things that she's still going to get to do with her life because they saved her life. They didn't cure her but they saved her. I started to hear those words over and over and over again. And that was when I think it finally hit me what story I had told. And also, just starting to see myself being reflected back at me. It's something I had never seen before. Never on television or in a movie where someone else's cancer looks like mine, or their disability looks like mine. That's something I think everybody should have the opportunity to see, to see a version of themselves reflected back.

In the end, Catherine will have to live with cancer but she looks forward to all of the things she's going to accomplish instead of dwelling on the what-ifs. What went into the decision to give that hopeful ending?
Finch: It's the most honest ending, with regards to my own story. I'm a person who lives with cancer. I'm not dying of it. I am not cured of it. I have it and it's a part of my life and it's not my entire life. That was what I was interested in telling in the first place. That's what [Grey's showrunner] Krista Vernoff asked me to consider relating. We've seen patients that live in the cured space or that live in the dead space. We don't see cancer patients who live in a space where they have it and they have their full lives too. So it wasn't just about we'd like to stick a hopeful ending on the end of this episode. It was more about telling a version of cancer that doesn't get told anywhere.

This episode could have been very dark but it wasn't. There were moments of laughter, like when Jackson danced with Catherine. How important was it for you to include humor during this hour?
Finch: It's so true to mix in those heartbreaking moments with those moments of crazy laughter and crazy joy because that was my experience and continues to be my experience. There are days where things are not good and I feel miserable and I'm doing miserably. And then there are days where thing are absurd and I'm absurd. And there are days where it's half and half and then any moment, I think those moments of grief and joy come in intermittently and that's true to life. I had in my head for a long time that I wanted to see Catherine singing a song to herself while she was going through the scanner because that's how I measure time in my head when I'm going through MRI machines. I just sing the same songs over and over again and I know an MRI machine is three versions of this song. And so, having those little moments that are odd but true felt really tightly put together. And how could you ever resist having Debbie Allen dance it out on the OR floor? Like who wouldn't want that dream?!

Oh, that was fantastic!
Finch: It was my all-time favorite thing I've gotten to do on Grey's.

This episode also touched on the language we use with regard to cancer, those militant terms like "battle" and "fight." How did that language play into the way you dealt with cancer and what do you hope to change about it?
Finch: I really hope the thing people take away from this episode is that militarized language around cancer is often hurtful and destructive to the people dealing with it firsthand. I am not the mayor of Cancer Town so I cannot speak for everyone. If someone wants to adopt those words and that's what makes them feel better, that's up to them. But all the conversations that I've had with people that I know that are living with cancer or have cancer, they don't connect to it. And it assigns value to life and death.

I don't understand what winning and losing really means when you're talking about cancer. Because I have seen people who have read every medical text they possibly can, gone to every doctor they possibly can and have lived. I've see people do the same thing and die. I've seen people do nothing and be fine. I think it puts hurtful expectations on patients to somehow gear up or appear stronger than they are. And nothing drives me crazier than to read an obituary of someone who's passed away from cancer and say that they lost their fight. I don't know what that means because there ain't much in their control. They took their medicine or they didn't take their medicine and they died. And I take my medicine and I'm alive. It has nothing to do with my winning spirit or their losing spirit. It has nothing to do with what's good or bad or if I fight harder than those other people. It's luck. It's genetics. It's my doctor. It's my privilege. It's not in my control and so assigning those words as if it is in your control, I think, is harmful to people who are in that position.

Meredith touched on that in her voiceover. Did you at some point consider her to be a conduit for your own voice?
Finch: Yeah, I think her voiceover is my thesis statement for the episode. You see it in Thatcher who talks about how he got treatment and it didn't work and he died. You see Catherine who took her medicine, got her surgery and she lived. Neither of them is a winner or a loser, and Meredith gets to give words to that. Hopefully, that will register with people and they'll get to absorb a different point of view because of it.

How will we see Catherine deal with living with this disease and how will that affect the others around her?
Finch: What I'm interested in is watching someone living with cancer being normalized. Because I walk around in the world and other people that I know living with cancer walk around in the world and have good jobs and big families and a lot of love and a lot of things to do. And every once in a while, they have to go in and take care of themselves by going to a scan or seeing a doctor. Sometimes they have a bad couple of months and then a good couple of months and it becomes normal. It's not always in crisis mode. I don't live in crisis mode. I live from scan to scan. I appreciate all the time I have in between those scans. But my reality is, honestly, not that much different from anyone else because no day is promised. There's no guarantee that anyone is going to live 'til tomorrow. So I'm interested in watching Catherine live her life and go back to surgery and be with her family and talk about all the other things that are going on in her life and have all the other emotions about what's going on in her life that don't revolve around cancer. Because that's the reality for most people.

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

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