“Grey’s Anatomy” and Meredith Grey (Ellen Pompeo) have been at it for a while now, and it is the longest scripted show on ABC, having first aired in 2005. It has just been renewed for the 18th season and writer Krista Vernoff, who took over Shonda Rimes in 2017 has confirmed that stories of the global pandemic of COVID-19, will become part of the show.

The latest Instagram pictures show the “staff” already masked up and soon the new season will show what the world under Coronavirus looks like…

Here are more such examples of reality trickling into the cases of “Grey’s Anatomy”…

In one of the episodes in 2017, Dr. Nathan Riggs (as in Martin Henderson) is shown to perform the AngioVac procedure to treat a patient who has venous thromboembolism (VTE), a potentially fatal blood clot. 

When Closer Weekly contacted a real doctor to test the veracity of what was shown in the show, they were told that it was an excellent example of what truly would be done, for real. 

And why not, considering Chief of Neurosurgery Steven Giannotta, M.D., USC’s Keck School of Medicine has been the medical consultant for the writers of “Grey’s Anatomy” since 2005.

This reality, though, hurts.

Writer and exec-producer Elisabeth Finch beat cancer, after surgery, chemo, and many other medical procedures. So when showrunner Krista Vernoff asked her to weave her story in, she did, although with some reservations. 

And so Finch gave Fox (as in Debbie Allen) the same cancer she had, which was a Chondrosarcoma. Like life, it is shown to be partially removed and then zapped with chemo. Just like Finch, Fox also survives though Finch admitted, the sassiness of Fox is more of a wish than the truth. 

In season 14 of the show, Dr. Arizona Robbins, played by Jessica Capshaw, befriends a pregnant woman Peggy and her partner, Dana, and later encounters them again when Dana crashes a car. Dana then reveals she has stage 2 cancer and is getting treated by a doctor who has a “stellar record” in treating cancer patients. Robbins does her own digging and soon finds that the doctor is misdiagnosing patients and then treating them to commit insurance fraud. 

The case was taken from real-life Dr. Farid Fata. Needless to say, both the real and reel cancer docs are in jail now. 

In 2009, ABC News reported that 29-year-old Naomi Williams had to stop watching an episode of Grey’s Anatomy when she saw Izzie Stevens (Katherine Heigl) battle a melanoma that is later shown to be malignant and has her fighting for her life. 

Williams got her diagnosis when she bent down to pick up something and broke a bone in her back. She was diagnosed with a melanoma that the doctors could not find, but the cancer had traveled to her bones in the meanwhile. 

Deliberate or just as a coincidence, real-life has spilled into the real at “Grey’s Anatomy” many times, and is probably why people love the show so much!

Season 18, coming up… And then, read who Ellen Pompeo crushed on for the longest!