Grey's Anatomy writer took 'puke breaks' to help fake her cancer on set

Grey’s Anatomy writer Elisabeth Flinch went to great lengths to keep up with the façade of having cancer.

Elisabeth pretended to have the illness for almost a decade, and to help commit to the lie, she would take “puke breaks” while at work on the Grey’s Anatomy set. On top of that, she significantly changed her appearance in an attempt to make people believe she was undergoing chemotherapy. Elisabeth’s ex-coworker Andy Reaser shared in the forthcoming documentary, Anatomy of Lies, that she would come into work “with a shaved head and a greenish hue.” She did this so she could make herself look unwell.

Anatomy of Lies covers the untrue stories Elisabeth concocted about having health issues as a ploy to advance her career in Hollywood and inspire Grey's Anatomy episodes.

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In a clip from the upcoming doc, Andy dubbed Elisabeth’s actions as being “like performance art."

“I felt betrayal,” he divulged. “The thing is, it was so confusing. You have to move through eight years of interactions to even wrap your head around it and I'm not even sure that I still fully have.”

The writer and producer added: “She was showing up to work with a shaved head and a greenish hue. She looked like she lived in a microwave. She was eating these Saltines and drinking ginger ale and going to the bathroom to take puke breaks from her chemo.”

Andy also claimed that Elisabeth sifted through the props from the medical drama to help keep up her lie.

“I've heard people say she had gone to where all the medical props were and want to look at a very specific piece of something. For all I know, she had a Lego taped to her chest,” he revealed. “It's just so hard to imagine that someone could commit that strongly to that and it seems so much harder to me than just doing your job well.”

Elisabeth was hired to work on Grey’s Anatomy in 2014, and at the time, she pretended she had to go through a tough chemotherapy treatment. She claimed that the difficult procedure resulted in her losing a kidney and forced her to have an abortion. As time went on, some of Elisabeth’s fictitious tales wound up in the storylines of Grey’s Anatomy. Her lies didn’t stop there, as she also told a fib about being close friends with one of the victims of the anti-Semitic mass shooting attack on a Pittsburgh synagogue in 2018.

Seven years after Elisabeth spread her cancer falsehood, her wife Jennifer Byer, was the first to expose that it wasn’t true.