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Medical Professionals Fact-Check 'Grey's Anatomy' Sex Scenes

Medical Professionals Fact-Check 'Grey's Anatomy' Sex Scenes
Byron Cohen via Getty Images

In one of the most memorable scenes from “Grey’s Anatomy” Season 2, intern Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) and head of neurosurgery Derek Shepherd (Patrick Dempsey) get it on in a Seattle Grace Hospital exam room while their colleagues attend a prom-style event for Richard Webber’s (James Pickens Jr.) cancer-stricken teenage niece. The pair, having been torn apart by the sudden employment of Derek’s estranged wife and fellow doctor Addison (Kate Walsh), dramatically reunite in only the way a fated TV couple can, culminating in Meredith’s misplaced underwear being pinned on a staff bulletin board.

The whole thing is hot. It’s steamy. And it’s incredibly far-fetched.

Or is it?

There are lots of medical dramas on the air ― “Grey’s,” “Chicago Med,” “9-1-1,” “Code Black,” “The Resident,” etc. And each and every one features an unbelievable sex scene, during which surgeons hook up with interns (or nurses hook up with doctors, or chiefs hook up with residents ― you get it), turning their hospital’s on-call room into a veritable den of (consensual) sex among otherwise expertly professional co-workers.

Ahead of the “Grey’s” Season 14 finale, we found ourselves contemplating several questions. Will April Kepner (Sarah Drew) get a happy ending? Will Alex (Justin Chambers) and Jo’s (Camilla Luddington) wedding go off without a hitch? Will Carina (Stefania Spampinato) follow Arizona (Jessica Capshaw) to New York? But none were more pressing than this longtime contemplation: Are the sex scenes on the show realistic?

So, HuffPost decided to get down to it and ask medical professionals what really happens in on-call rooms. Behold, the truth:

Scenario 1: Sex In The Supply Closet (Or The On-Call Room, Or Empty Exam Rooms...)

In Season 2, Episode 16 of “Grey’s,” Izzie Stevens (Katherine Heigl) summons her friend-with-benefits Alex Karev (Justin Chambers) into a medical supply closet with the classic pickup line: “Do you want to stand there and talk metaphors or do you want to literally take off your pants?” Spoiler! He takes off his pants. Thus the question: Are doctors really hooking up in supply closets?

According to Dr. Jen Gunter, a San Francisco Bay Area OB/GYN and author, most on-call rooms in hospitals are “gross and often you share them with someone else.”

“I have never, ever in my 30-plus years in the medical field heard of anyone ever making out in a supply closet. I have never heard of anyone having sex in an on-call room. Might it happen very occasionally? I guess,” she said.

A Philadelphia-based registered nurse named Meg (who preferred not to use her last name in this piece, because, well, who can blame her), said stairwells ― not supply closets, on-call rooms or exam rooms ― are where the secret hookups happen.

“I don’t know of it ever happening in empty patient rooms or supply closets. People are in and out of the supply room on the units all the time,” she said. “I have heard of people getting caught in stairwells and I have also heard of people getting caught in locker rooms.”

“I know of a girl hooking up in a stairwell,” Jessica, an RN based in Boston, said. “Less scandal than people think in general, though!”

Eileen, a travel RN who’s worked in cities including New York, Seattle, San Diego and Boulder, said she knows of co-workers “sleeping with each other in their office and in an on-call room, always somewhere that has a lock on the door.”

And a pediatrician in Westchester County, New York, who asked to remain anonymous, only wished life in a hospital was so exciting. “It may be that pediatricians are just way more boring than doctors in other specialties. I do know of a teenage patient who was caught hooking up with her boyfriend while admitted to the hospital ― we had to set up some stricter rules on visitors after that.”

Scenario 2: Big-Shot Surgeons Who Hook Up With Their Junior Colleagues