At the hospital, Mere comes upon Richard putting a surgery up on the board and is clearly dismayed when she sees that he is signing himself up to do a whipple, but he tells her that it's the best way to come back: "Go big or go home." Avery comes up, worried that he has lost his spot now that Bailey isn't doing the surgery, but Richard tells him that he's welcome to help and that he can open the patient so that Mere can "dissect the neck of the pancreas from the portal vein." Mere is dumbfounded and stutters that that is the hardest part of the surgery, while Avery adds that it's a 5th year procedure. Richard just happily tells her that it's what they have been practicing, and she's ready, but... she cuts him off before he can offer an alternative and insists that she can do it.

Once at work, Alex goes to the ER to see if Hunt needs any help, but Hunt can barely hear the question because someone is singing scales in a booming voice. He tells Alex to put a stop to it, so Alex finds the location of the singing and pulls back the curtain, where he has to finally scream in the guy's face to get him to shut up. The patient, Aaron, snottily informs Alex that he had to do it to get everyone to see how serious his problem is -- he has lost his upper register. Alex is not nearly as horrified by this as Aaron is, and Nurse Tyler is back to give the guy the best sideways stink-eye. Aaron declares that he needs antibiotics because his boyfriend, standing next to him, gave him bronchitis and he needs his voice back as he's going to be performing in Tosca. His boyfriend, Jeff, tells him in a rather defeated voice that he didn't give him bronchitis, but Aaron tells Alex and Tyler that Jeff teaches piano to children, sounding like it's a job on par with scraping dog poo from the sidewalk, and he's sure one of the little brats passed it along. Alex just orders an x-ray and brushes off the idea of taking Aaron for it himself, but when he goes back to help Hunt it turns out he's gone, so Alex is stuck with the singer who starts up his scales again.