Janell Barnett

Janell Barnett came into the hospital after experiencing a severe headache for six weeks.

History
Janell had been suffering from extremely painful headaches for the past six weeks. She'd previously been told that it was probably a migraine, but since the medicine didn't work, she came back into the ER with her husband, Randy. While describing the pain to Meredith, Janell had a seizure, so Meredith had Derek paged and called for an EEG.

Janell wasn't responding to the migraine medication, so Derek suggested putting her in a medically-induced coma so that the seizures wouldn't damage her brain. Randy agreed and Janell was put into a coma.

Meredith noticed that Janell was having a hemolytic anemia, which indicated an autoimmune response. Meredith figured out that she had a teratoma. They found a mass on her lung that she believed was the teratoma, so they scheduled surgery to remove it. However, after they removed it, pathology determined that the mass was a benign granuloma, so the search for the teratoma continued.

The most likely location of the tumor was in her ovaries, so they went back to Randy to ask him about it and he said that Janell wants kids, so he refused to let them remove her ovaries.

In surgery, they noticed a lot of adhesions on her right ovary, which could indicate a tumor, so they removed the right to examine it for microscopic tumors. When it came back clean, they removed her other ovary, effectively sterilizing her.

The pathologist looked at the specimen. He said that he needed to look at more slides to confirm it, but Meredith pushed him aside and looked at it herself. Then she and Bailey pushed him to say it was a teratoma.

After the surgery, Janell's coma was reserved and she was pain-free.

Romantic
She is married to Randy Barnett. They have known each other since high school.

Notes and Trivia

 * She was 32 at the time of her hospitalization.