My eight year experience with "Grey's Anatomy" has been a wildly tumultuous one. I first started watching "Grey's" in the eighth grade, and the first episode I saw had me hooked. After that first episode, which I saw by chance in mid-season without any context, I decided I needed to immerse myself in the show in order to fully enjoy it. I went to the local library and picked up the dvd box sets of the earlier seasons. In the pre-Netflix days, this was considered an old-fashioned binge watch. I devoured the first two seasons, and from that day on, I never missed a single episode. There have surely been moments where I swore I would quit it forever — times where I was disappointed with a writing choice, or a storyline I didn't find interesting. But I stuck with it, and essentially what ensued were countless tears, shouting matches with my television or computer screen, and a repeatedly broken heart. Having seen every episode of this thoroughly dramatic 12-season show, I frequently recall the episodes that made me sit up on the edge of my seat, gnawing away at my fingernails, and the episodes that had me reaching for the tissues and whimpering to my best friend through tears about that week's particularly biting trauma patient death. Here are what I consider the top ten most absurd, best, and dramatic episodes of "Grey's Anatomy."

10. Meredith has two secret sisters come out of the wood work.

During season three, Meredith finds out that Lexie Grey is her half-sister via their biological father, Thatcher Grey, and his second wife, Susan. Lexie moves to Seattle when her mother dies at Seattle Grace from the hiccups (by the way, what in the world was that?) and ends up continuing her surgical internship at Seattle Grace which is when she confesses to Meredith that she is her younger half-sister.

Later in season ten, Meredith is minding her own business when all of a sudden, a second half-sister pops in at the hospital as well. She is Maggie Pierce, taking the place of Jeff Russell as the head of cardiothoracic surgery. A few weeks in, she confesses to Richard Webber that she is adopted, but that her biological mother once worked at Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital, or as it was formerly known, Seattle Grace. Webber asks her what her mom's name was, and she reveals that her mother was the late Ellis Grey. She comes to find out that her father is Richard, and that she and Meredith share a mom.

9. Owen chokes Cristina.

Cristina Yang and Owen Hunt are dating in season five. She finds out that he has post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) relating to his experiences as a trauma surgeon while at war. In one episode, he punches through glass and severely cuts his hand. In another episode, he and Cristina are in bed, sleeping, and the overhead fan triggers a particularly bad memory for Owen of a plane's propellers. He suddenly swings over Cristina and begins choking her. He is not quite lucid, and it takes a lot of effort on Cristina's part to get him off of her. The whole scene is vivid and scary, verging on too suspenseful as most scenes where someone is being choked or suffocated usually tend to.

8. Cristina unknowingly operating on Henry for Teddy.

In season eight, Teddy Altman ends up married to a patient named Henry who cannot afford health insurance who she desperately wants to help. Eventually, they develop real feelings for each other and fall in love. Unfortunately, his tumor and heart conditions do not go away completely, and in one episode he is rushed to the hospital. Webber initially planned to open his chest, but Teddy decided she wanted Cristina to do the surgery with a scope. She was advised that Cristina may waver under the pressure to perform perfectly if she knew the identity of the patient was her mentor's husband, and so she directed the assisting surgeons in the operating room to withhold all personal details like his name and age from Christina, other than the patient's medical stats.

Cristina operated on Henry but in the end he did not survive. She treated the surgery as she would have any other, and in an unaffected tone asked, "Is there a family, or um, something, we need to talk to?" That's when Owen took her aside and told her what she had just done — who she had just operated on. Her reaction? Complete shock.

7. Callie gets into a car crash while pregnant.

Callie Torres and her girlfriend Arizona Robbins are driving to their weekend getaway in season seven, when Arizona turns to her after a fight about how she is jealous of Mark Sloan, the father of Callie's unborn baby, and asks her to marry her. Callie was about to call Mark when Arizona snatched the phone out of her hand and threw it into the backseat. Callie unbuckles her seatbelt and reaches into the backseat to grab it, which is when they have their fight. Arizona pops the question, but before Callie can actually respond, they crash headfirst into a truck, and Callie goes shooting out the windshield and onto the hood of the car. The journey to recovery for Callie and her baby Sofia is a long and winding road. This episode is also a musical episode, and some of the main characters sing in it.

6. Meredith drowns and almost dies.

In season three, there's this episode where a ferry boat crashes and Meredith is on the scene of the accident, helping a little girl, when she falls into the water. Derek Shepherd notices that Meredith hasn't returned from helping the girl, so he goes to find them. When he gets there he sees the girl, but not Meredith. He asks her if Meredith is OK, and she shakes her head. Derek realizes Meredith is drowning, and jumps in to fetch her. The entire rest of the episode shows the doctors at Seattle Grace trying to save her life. It also features Meredith in a dream-like state, where she is able to review her life and her choices up to then, like a spirit about to move on to the next world.

5. Meredith puts her hand in a patient with a live explosive inside of him.

This was a fantastic episode in season two that had everyone watching on the edge of their seat the entire time. It starts with Meredith saying she has a premonition that she is going to die that day. Later, an ambulance drops off a man with a paramedic over him with her hand in a cavity in his body to keep him from bleeding out, and his wife, who is screaming loudly in shock. Alex Karev gets her to calm down long enough to find out that her husband has been shot by a homemade bazooka, and that it is still inside him and has not yet exploded. At that point, the bomb squad is called and the paramedic with her hand in the cavity begins to panic. All the doctors must be especially careful not to jostle his bed around too much or make sudden or even slight movements which could shift the bomb and cause it to explode right there in the hospital.

Eventually the paramedic, Hannah, and Meredith are left alone with the patient in a secluded room in bomb-proof vests. Hannah begins to panic and suddenly decides to pull her hand out. Everyone watching from behind a window ducks and moves out of the way except for Meredith, who immediately stuck her hand into the patient exactly where Hannah had hers.

4. George O'Malley dies.

This season six episode only made the list because one of my best friends said I was nuts for not including it. She was right — my personal vendetta against George was my main reason not to include his death on the list. I have always thought he was a boring character, whiny, and a push-over too. The truth is, though, he was an important character with integrity, and when he got hit by a bus and brought to Seattle Grace, the entire surgical staff was shaken. At first they did not know who this patient was because of how badly he was deformed. They refer to these patients as "John Doe." However in a very touching scene where no one can find George, Meredith goes in to check on "John Doe," who can hear but can't speak. He slowly lifts his hand and puts it in Meredith, and begins to trace something into her palm. She deciphers it: "0... 0... 7... 007!" She runs out into the hall and tells her friends that the "John Doe" is George based on this nickname they used to refer to him as in an earlier season when he almost killed a patient in a very simple surgery. At first they don't believe her, but then they rush him to surgery. Unfortunately he does not make it and ends up brain dead. They run to get Callie to confirm that it really was George who died on the table, and she sadly identifies him based on a freckle she could remember from when they were dating.

3. Derek dies.

This moment is quite complicated and happened over a series of episodes in seasons 11 and 12. Derek gets hit by a truck after helping a bunch of people who got into car crashes on a freeway. He was on his way to the airport for a trip to Washington D.C. where he was working at the time. Once he was hit, he was brought to an understaffed, less-skilled hospital than Grey Sloan Memorial. He has the ability to hear but not to move or speak, and he critiques the doctor's surgical plans. He should have received a head CT, but does not because the Neurosurgeon on call takes too long to get to Derek. He is declared brain dead when Meredith comes to pick him up. This is one of the most shocking "Grey's Anatomy" deaths of all time. No one saw this coming.

2. Plane crash.

On their way to harvest some important organs at a distant hospital, a plane crashes in season eight with Meredith, Lexie, Derek, Cristina, Arizona and Mark Sloan on it. In this episode, Lexie was crushed by a piece of the plane and slowly dies by the end of it because the other doctors cannot release her from it. Derek's hand is crushed, and in later episodes he nearly loses his ability to operate with it because of nerve damage. Mark dies in later episodes due to injuries sustained during the crash — although he looked stable for some time, when he returned he had to have surgery and died a few days post-op. Arizona has her leg crushed so badly that in a later episode has to have it amputated. This decision to amputate stems from Callie, her wife, and this causes massive problems in their marriage throughout that season. Arizona resents Callie for that decision and their marriage is not the same after that. Cristina develops PTSD and cannot get on planes again. She ends up working at a small, random hospital until she manages to fly back to Seattle Grace, which she was scared to return to because "everyone there dies." (She's not wrong!)

1. Shooter in Seattle Grace Hospital.

This season six episode is my favorite episode of "Grey's Anatomy" of all time. So much happens on it, and it is undeniably the most dramatic episode. An angry, vengeful husband who is widowed due to his wife dying on Derek's table returns to Seattle Grace to take Derek's life in return for his wife's death. In this episode alone, Meredith discovers she is pregnant with Derek's baby: reoccurring characters Reed and Charles are both shot: Reed is shot in the head fatally and is discovered by April Kepner, who runs to tell Derek that she found Reed shot dead in a pool of her own blood. He is chief of surgery at the time and puts the hospital on lockdown. Charles is shot after being found in a closet and dies slowly only because Miranda Bailey cannot help him without O.R. access, which during the time of a lockdown is forbidden.

Karev is shot in the armpit and begins to lose a lot of blood. He drags himself into an elevator and is found by Lexie, who operates on him without anesthesia or sufficient surgical tools. Derek gets shot, and Meredith and Cristina witness it. Cristina tries to stop her from running to him because she is afraid Meredith will get shot, but Meredith goes anyway and she follows. They see that Derek has been shot in the chest, and Cristina decides to operate. She does not allow Meredith in because it will make her nervous. Once they get in there, the gunman comes in through another entrance and points his gun at Cristina's head. He tells her to stop or he will shoot her — he wants Derek to die. She continues to operate at gunpoint. Meredith runs in and tells him to shoot her instead, but they trick him into thinking that Derek dies. Meredith doesn't know it's a trick and it scares her so much that she has a miscarriage. Owen gets shot, and so Meredith operates on him in the O.R. next to Cristina; the two best friends operating on each other's boyfriends. The complications that arise in episodes following this one are complex and long-lasting. This is definitely the best, most dramatic episode of "Grey's."