How Grey's Anatomy's Big Cancer Story Was Based on Real Life

Grey's Anatomy has always loved to fictionalize real medical emergencies, but tonight's episode was really, really real for writer and executive producer Elisabeth Finch. 

Finch, who wrote tonight's episode and the fall episode "Anybody Have a Map?," modeled Catherine Fox's (Debbie Allen) cancer journey after her own, writing her own experiences into the show and then watching them play out on set and on screen in front of her. 

That, for her, was the hardest part. 

"Often when I'm writing things I separate a little bit and don't consciously know that I'm putting in so much of my own personal story, and then I go to set and I hear it over and over and over again. 

And then I realized, oh, holy crap, I just put my life out there and I'm watching it happen," Finch tells E! News. 

While Finch admits writing herself into the badass Catherine Fox is a bit of "wish fulfillment," most of Catherine's journey so far matches hers pretty closely, especially in terms of the surgery and the result. 

"I did not get to dance it out in my OR, which I super regret now," Finch joked. "You know, Catherine is a very different person than I am fundamentally, but it's the same... I had the same type of cancer, Chondrosarcoma. It was in my spine and my lower spine adjusted it where it would be so that it would impact, potentially, her surgical career, which I do not have, but the outcome is very similar."

Catherine's surgery didn't go 100% as planned. It went more like 95% planned, as one piece of the tumor had to be left to keep her spine intact, which is exactly the same way that surgery went for Finch. 

"The majority of my tumor was shrunk with chemo and dealt with in very different medical ways. But some of it remains and may always remain, and that's true of Catherine as well, so Catherine will be walking in the world as a person living with cancer in a similar way that I do. She will continue to be a surgeon. She will continue to have her family and her friends and her full life. I'm the same way that I have a full time job in friends and family and a life." 

Finch says she really wanted to say no when showrunner Krista Vernoff asked if she would write her own cancer experiences into the show, but the request came after Finch's own complaints in the writers' room about the way cancer is typically dealt with. 

"The genesis of it was me talking in the writer's room casually one day, just about the language that we use surrounding cancer and how much that can aggravate me, and Krista approached me a couple days after that and said, you know, you have a unique perspective on this because you're living with cancer. Would you consider doing a story about that?" Finch recalls. "And I said I would. I wanted to say no because I was a little intimidated by it."