Grey’s Anatomy: 10 Of Cristina Yang’s Scariest Surgeries

Dr. Cristina Yang, played by the incomparable Sandra Oh, is one of the smartest, most promising new surgical interns when viewers first meet her in the pilot episode of the hit primetime medical drama, Grey’s Anatomy.

Dr. Yang is cutthroat and competitive and won’t let anyone or anything get in her way when it comes to scrubbing in and tackling tough surgeries. By the time Cristina exits the series, at the end of season 10, she’s seen and been through it all.

10 Constance Ferguson

Constance comes into the emergency room from the state prison, where she was being held in solitary confinement. Constance, who is in prison for murder, went a little crazier in solitary confinement and has swallowed a couple of razor blades, knowing she’d get to take a “field trip” to the hospital if she did that.

Cristina is the one treating the patient, who tells her not to be scared even though she’s killed three people but, “none of them were doctors.” That doesn’t ease any of Cristina’s anxiety surrounding this difficult case.

9 Toxic Blood

A group of surgeons, including George and Richard Webber, are operating on a woman with cancer. George suddenly feels sick and needs to lie down, and a few minutes later everyone in the operating room has collapsed. The doctors discover that the patient was taking an herbal supplement for her cancer that caused her blood to become toxic.

When the patient was opened up, those toxins were released, harming the doctors operating on her. As Cristina had not been affected, she must rush in to close the woman on the table before the patient wakes up or Cristina passes out.

8 Zombie Man

It’s Halloween, which usually brings some strange cases to the emergency room at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital. Cristina and Owen get a very strange case when a man is admitted to the hospital after being shot twice in the heart because he attacked and bit the other man.

The strangest thing is that this man seems to be doing fine, despite being shot in the heart. Upon further tests, Cristina learns that this man has situs inversus, which causes a person’s organs to be mirrored in their body and makes for a particularly challenging surgical procedure for Cristina to execute.

7 Domino Surgery

A group of twelve patients are admitted to the hospital for a domino surgery, where six kidneys will be donated to six sick patients. It’s a delicate procedure and each transplant must go smoothly for the next one to work.

This is a procedure that requires all fifteen attending surgeons and Richard Webber asks Cristina to scrub in on his part. Cristina, of course, jumps at the opportunity, but she is understandably nervous once in the OR. Luckily for both Cristina and Webber, they complete their portion successfully.

6 Icicle

Cristina finds herself on a gurney being rushed into the emergency room at Seattle Grace Hospital when, in a freak accident, she is impaled by an icicle during a fight with Meredith.

Luckily, the icicle misses any major organs or anything important internally, so Cristina knows it’s just a matter of removing the object from her abdomen. The new hot doctor in Seattle, Owen Hunt, comes into Cristina’s trauma room and removes the icicle from her body.

5 Covering For Burke

Burke is shot in a dramatic episode at the end of season 2, while outside in the parking lot of the hospital. The injury causes permanent nerve damage to his hand, but the only other person who knows that is Burke’s fiancé, Cristina.

Cristina sees that Burke is having tremors and starts scrubbing in on all of his surgeries to cover for him whenever a tremor strikes. While Cristina knows she should report Burke, she can’t bring herself to do it, putting her own career at risk.

4 The Vows

On the day Cristina is supposed to marry Burke, she is nervous. She is hanging out on the eve of her wedding with Callie and Meredith, with the former deciding it’s best for Cristina to write her vows on her hand. Cristina agrees, knowing she is not someone who can just speak from the heart.

The next day, as Cristina’s nerves escalate, she rushes to the hospital to scrub in for surgery, knowing that it will calm her down. While it initially does just that, Cristina eventually realizes that she washed the vows off her hand and it’s too late to re-write them.

3 The Plane Crash

Cristina is one of the six doctors involved in a tragic plane crash at the end of season 8, which kills both Lexie Grey and Mark Sloan. While still waiting to be rescued, the doctors who are conscious and able are tending to their worse-off colleagues and the pilot of the aircraft.

Cristina, who is the least physically injured of them all, rushes to help the pilot who needs a C-spine stabilization. Cristina performs the task and then stabs the pilot in the leg with a pen to see if he’s indeed paralyzed, which he is.

2 Disarm

After a shooting at Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital, Cristina is left with PTSD and quits her job at the hospital. The subsequent episodes show Cristina trying to figure out what’s next while simultaneously working through her trauma.

While walking around Seattle, Cristina hears a slew of ambulances and rushes to help. She shows up in the back of an ambulance at the hospital with her hands in the patient’s chest, closing a hole in his right ventricle. Cristina is keeping this patient alive and must go into the OR for the first time since suffering her shooting trauma.

1 Derek

A distraught man with a gun comes to the hospital looking for Derek, who he wants to kill because he thinks Derek is responsible for killing his wife in surgery. The shooter, Gary, finds Derek and succeeds in shooting him.

Cristina and Meredith find Derek and get him to an OR so they can try to save him. In the middle of the operation, Gary finds them and holds a gun to Cristina’s head, ordering her to stop the procedure. Cristina is terrified but continues to operate on Derek.

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