Mark Sloan

## Mark Everett Sloan

**Mark Sloan** is a plastic surgeon and otolaryngologist, as well as the current co-Chief of Surgery at Seattle Grace Mercy West Hospital. He is married to Lexie Grey-Sloan and they have three children; two sons, Theodore and Maxwell, and a daughter, Geneva. He is also the father of Sam Riley and Sofia Sloan-Torres.

## History

### Early History

Mark was born at 10:21 PM on May 2, 1968 in New York City. His parents were wealthy but emotionally distant. While working on a case involving a man's sleepwalking and his daughter's subsequent insomnia, Mark revealed that his own parents would often go out at night, leaving him to care for himself. He would turn on all the TVs and every light in the house, even those in the closets, but still couldn't sleep.

Mark met Derek Shepherd on September 6, 1973. The two attended the same elementary school. When Derek's mother, Carolyn, saw how lonely he was, she encouraged Derek to befriend him and bring him home. This led Mark to develop a family relationship with the Shepherds and become like a brother to Derek. When Derek's mother visited Seattle, she revealed that a ten-year-old Mark once put Derek's favourite frog into the microwave, to which Mark replied that he never pressed start.

Mark's mother became sick in September 1978. Tests revealed that she had stage four adenocarcinoma of the lungs. She spent two months in the hospital, during which Mark began living with the Shepherds nearly full-time. She died shortly before thanksgiving of the same year. Mark was the only person in the room for her death.

Mark attended Roosevelt High School, where he was an athlete and played on the football team. He was nominated for Prom Court, but lost out on Prom King by eight votes.

Mark attended Columbia University for both his undergraduate and medical degrees. As an undergraduate student, he majored in Art History. In his college years, Mark was briefly out as bisexual. However, in the wake of the AIDS crisis and under scrutiny from his peers, including Derek, Mark chose to re-closet himself in the months leading up to graduation and lived as a straight man for several decades after.

Mark typically cites his first truly traumatizing patient as a young boy who had been blinded in an accident during his intern year at New York Hospital in 1994. Mark was left responsible for his care overnight. Years later, he discovered via Lucas Alvarez that this patient was Matt Murdock.

Mark was off of work and had gone for a jog on the morning of 9/11. When he saw the plane hit the North Tower, he immediately went into the hospital. Being a young plastic surgeon, he was at the hospital for four days straight after the attacks, treating several burn victims. When the head of plastic surgery finally told him to go home, it was Saturday morning. When Mark got home, he found it was too quiet, and so decided to bike over to Derek and Addison's instead. While having a cigarette on their front steps, Derek came out to talk to him. Mark expressed that he wasn't sure he could stomach working in a hospital, and asked Derek if he and Addison had been serious in their discussions of opening a private practice. Shortly afterwards, the three purchased an office in Manhattan and began working together. They continued working out of the location until Derek’s move to Seattle, after which Addison soon followed and Mark was left to maintain the practice. Mark would later sell the practice after getting a job in Seattle.

While they were living together after Derek’s departure to Seattle, Addison became pregnant with Mark’s baby. Though she initially did not intend on telling him, Mark was ecstatic, and went out and purchased a Yankees onesie and a calendar, on which he marked the due date. Despite Mark’s insistence that he was more than happy to raise a baby with Addison, she did not believe he would have been a good father. After Addison had an abortion, Mark went through a depressive episode. In the weeks after, he "tore April out of the calendar and fed it through the shredder, thought seriously about setting things on fire, and cheated." He hardly knew any of the women he slept with, and began avoiding them completely afterwards due to his guilty conscience.

### Moving to Seattle

Shortly before Derek's move to Seattle, Mark and Addison were caught having sex in Derek's bedroom. According to Mark, Derek merely walked out, packed his things, and left. Part of the reason Mark moved to Seattle was to try and continue his relationship with Addison. Addison gave him an ultimatum: if he could go sixty days without sleeping with anyone else, she would consider dating him. However, when Mark saw Addison and Alex Karev coming out of an on-call room together, he realized that they had sex, and lied to Addison that he had been the one to sleep with someone and break the contract, as he didn't want her to feel guilty for not wanting a relationship with him.

Mark first visited Seattle to bring Addison back to New York. Shortly after arriving at Seattle Grace Hospital, Derek punched him. It is later revealed, while Meredith is cleaning his wound, that it was due to his stronger feelings for Meredith than Addison. Meredith and Mark only spoke to each other and Mark got punched, whereas Mark and Addison had sex and Derek simply walked away and didn't look back. Mark slept with Addison again before he intended to leave, but stayed and became the Head of Plastic Surgery.

Mark was in the running for Chief of Surgery, along with Derek, Burke, and Addison. He got an idea from Bailey that the hospital needed a "right now" plan, not a ten-year plan. Richard Webber told the other three candidates that the board was eating up the "right now" plan, and suggested that they should do the same.

## Personality

While first meeting Meredith Grey, Mark divulged that according to his four hundred dollar an hour shrink, behind his rugged and confident exterior he was self-destructive and self-loathing to an almost pathological degree.

## Relationships

### Romantic

#### Lexie Grey-Sloan

Mark and Lexie's relationship started off professionally, with Lexie being the intern on several of Mark's cases and developing an interest in plastic surgery and otolaryngology. Though he originally considered her to be the less talented Grey, he later retracted this statement as he saw Lexie’s abilities as a surgeon.

Meredith started to worry that Mark was flirting with Lexie, causing Derek to tell Mark to "keep little Sloan out of Little Grey." However, Mark realized his attraction to her shortly after. Mark was initially reluctant to pursue a relationship out of loyalty to Derek, as Lexie was the sister of his best friend's wife. He was also put off by the large difference in their ages, which led to him repressing his feelings and becoming irritable.

After encouragement from Sadie Harris, Lexie went to Mark's hotel room, stripped, and asked him to "teach her," which served as the beginning of a secret relationship. They grew close very quickly and Mark developed true feelings for her.

Lexie soon grew tired of keeping secrets and told Mark she wasn't going to be his girlfriend until he told Derek. Mark confessed, and Derek was initially outraged, but grew to accept their relationship after realizing how deeply Mark really cared for Lexie. Their relationship continued successfully for months.

Later, Lexie finally told Mark she was still in love with him. He said nothing in response. Mark told Derek that he was torn between Lexie, the woman he loved but who he didn't think wanted anything that he wanted, and Julia, who was willing to give him everything he wanted. Mark and Lexie boarded the plane to Idaho with their feelings unresolved.

During the plane crash, Mark fought to save Lexie despite the extent of her injuries. He was able to lift the piece of the plane that was crushing her, and managed to keep her alive for several hours until help arrived. Before she fell unconscious, Mark confessed his love to her, stating that they would get married and have children and that she would become an amazing surgeon.

After the plane crash, Lexie and Mark got together for the third and final time. They reached an unspoken mutual agreement to get married once they had recovered. Mark tried to propose several times while they were in the hospital, which Lexie always denied, knowing how important everything being perfect was to him.

Mark and Lexie were married on May 25, 2013.

#### Samantha Riley

Over the summer of 1990, Mark met and had a fling with Samantha Riley. Samantha had taken a temporary nursing job at a hospital in a small vacation town upstate, where Mark was volunteering to boost his resume as a medical student. When Samantha became pregnant, Mark was terrified. He offered her a couple hundred dollars before leaving town, after which he never saw Samantha again. He hoped she had gotten an abortion, but was not surprised when their daughter showed up in Seattle nineteen years later.

### Friendships

#### Derek Shepherd

Mark met Derek while they were attending the same elementary school. Mark was in kindergarten and Derek was in the first grade. Though Mark recognized Derek from the French preschool both boys had attended, they did not become acquainted until September 6, 1973. Derek's mother, Carolyn, had insisted that Derek befriend Mark, who was frequently seen sitting on a park bench on the school's playground when his parents would accidentally lock the door before they left for work, still maintaining that Mark was too irresponsible to have a key to the house.

Mark and Derek had a brief fling over the summer of 1985. Their relationship began to fizzle out when Derek went away to college, and officially ended when he came back for Thanksgiving break acting as though it had never happened. Derek notably told Mark that he wasn't gay, and he hoped Mark wasn't, either. Mark was devastated and began flirting with several of the girls in his classes to keep his mind off Derek. Despite this, their friendship quickly returned to normal, with both parties later denying they ever had a romantic relationship. Mark would later disclose this to Lexie several years into their marriage. Sofia and Zola came upon the truth themselves while going through boxes in Meredith’s attic, where they found notes written back and forth between the two.

Derek and Mark, along with Addison Forbes Montgomery, Naomi Bennett, and Sam Bennett, lived in a house together during medical school.

## Career

Mark attended Columbia University College of Physicians and Surgeons. He completed a surgical residency at New York Hospital, specializing in otolaryngology before finishing a fellowship in plastic surgery, becoming double board certified.

After his fellowship, Mark began working in a private practice with Derek Shepherd and Addison Montgomery. He quickly became one of the most highly-regarded plastic surgeons on the East Coast.

Professionally, Mark is regarded as a very successful and renowned surgeon. While living in New York, he was considered the "go-to-guy" for plastics on the East Coast, and Richard Webber proposed that the addition of Mark to Seattle Grace's plastics program would double the revenue of other departments. He is skilled at delicate and complex reconstructive procedures, but also performs cosmetic procedures. Of his personal philosophy, he says: "People don't come to me to fix what's on the outside. They come to me to fix what's on the inside."

After some time working at Seattle Grace Hospital, he considered terminating his verbal contract with Richard and moving back to New York, but decided to stay after Meredith let it slip that Richard was retiring. Mark entered the race for the chief position and quickly gained the advantage when the others prepared ten-year plans and he prepared a right-now plan, taking the words from Bailey. The board members and the chief applauded him, but in the end he failed to earn the position. However, he stayed at Seattle Grace to work on his relationship with Derek, and Seattle itself started to appeal to him as well.

Mark began to take an interest in mentoring Jackson Avery. Derek surmised that his "sudden interest in education" was a result of him not being in a sexual relationship at the time. Jackson had initially been interested in neurosurgery, but later switched to plastics much to his mother's chagrin.

When Miranda Bailey stepped back from her role as Chief of Surgery, Mark was brought in as interim Chief. He tried and failed to hide his disappointment when she returned, which resulted in Dr. Bailey begrudgingly suggesting that they share the Chief position.

As Chief of Surgery, Mark implemented several new policies. Alongside Drs. Bailey and Webber, he helped build community among surgical residents through non-surgical committees and events. One of his more popular implementations was the residency yearbook, featuring each class and the highlights from their year. He also began reserving one day a month for performing free gender-affirming surgeries, particularly for undocumented or underserved individuals. This led to him gaining a reputation in Seattle as not only one of the best, but also one of the most accessible plastic surgeons for these procedures.

## Notes and Trivia

* He is a Taurus Sun, Cancer Moon, and Sagittarius Rising.
* His choice of coffee is a bone dry cappuccino.
* He had chickenpox when he was six.
* His blood type is B positive.
* He was on his high school's football team.
* While living in New York, his favourite place to smoke was the steps of Derek and Addison's brownstone.