call me a tragedy enjoyer but i just LOVE belle being unable to save the girl with an aortic aneurysm. i love how it's the first time we see belle fail in a medical setting and how it's this, of all things, the very surgery that saved her, and she has to live with the knowledge that another surgeon was able to do what she herself could not. i love her panic as she realizes she's made a mistake, how she runs to find sneed, and how sneed speaks to her like she's an equal, doesn't condemn her, doesn't do or say anything to make her more panicked or upset. and i love love love how she falls apart when the girl dies on her table, and she's the only one who does, because she's the only one who's never lost a patient before, but also this isn't just any patient, this could have been her. and if she had been the surgeon assigned to her own surgery, she would be dead. that jack saved her then, but he was nowhere to be found now, and he probably would have saved this girl, but all she got was belle, and belle wasn't good enough.
belle has always known that she is good and she has been underestimated and condescended her entire life and she's taken solace in the fact that the people doing that have always been wrong. but now she looks at her patient, who died on her table, and for the very first time, she wonders whether they were right. whether it was her own arrogance, her desperate ambition, that killed this girl. because she was reckless, unpracticed, and she nicked the aorta, and now the girl is dead, and sneed and jack are right, of course, that sometimes patients die, that you can do everything right and still lose the patient, but belle will always carry this with her, this first loss. this failure to give the second chance she got. she will always feel like this was her fault.
