Characters come and go on “Grey’s Anatomy” all the time, and sometimes, they leave the show in seriously shocking ways. When Patrick Dempsey’s character Derek Shepherd exited the long-running medical drama while pursuing a high-profile racing career, showrunner Shonda Rhimes graciously killed Derek in a gruesome car crash. Isaiah Washington basically disappeared into the night after some … ugly on-set drama. T.R. Knight, who played original surgical intern George O’Malley, got hit by a bus and died from such severe injuries that his friends and co-workers didn’t even recognize him. Bad stuff happens on “Grey’s,” basically. Even Ellen Pompeo’s lead character Meredith Grey — who ostensibly left the series in February 2023 but still appears in it pretty reliably — experienced a plane crash, a mass shooting, severe personal injuries, and a nearly-fatal case of COVID-19 before she “exited” the show in the Season 19 premiere (as a regular, at least). 

This is all to say that Dr. Callie Torres, an orthopedic surgeon played by Sara Ramírez, was spared a particularly ugly exit when Ramírez left the show in 2016. (Ramírez identifies as a queer nonbinary person and uses they/them pronouns.) After Ramírez confirmed that they wouldn’t return to the series in an Instagram post that year (which has since been deleted), fans breathed a sigh of relief that nothing overly bad happened to Callie, a beloved character who spent 11 seasons as one of the most prominent queer characters on mainstream TV. So how exactly did Callie leave the fictional, Seattle-based Grey Sloan Memorial Hospital behind? What has Ramírez been doing since their work on “Grey’s Anatomy,” and how and why did they decide to put the hit network drama behind them?

First introduced in the show’s second season (after Sara Ramírez received an open offer to join an ABC show thanks to their Tony-winning performance in Broadway’s “Spamalot”), Callie Torres was originally a love interest for T.R. Knight’s George O’Malley — but after their relationship (and short-lived marriage) flamed out spectacularly on screen and Knight left the show, Callie was free to explore a new side of herself. Callie has sporadic relationships with men throughout the show, like her best friend with benefits Dr. Mark Sloan (Eric Dane), but in Season 4, she falls hard for Brooke Davis’ cardiothoracic surgeon Erica Hahn, at which point the show firmly establishes that Callie is bisexual. (According to Ramirez, they were the reason that Shonda Rhimes explored this storyline in the first place and suggested that Callie be openly bisexual.) 

In Season 5, while Callie is still reeling from her relationship with Erica, she meets Dr. Arizona Robbins (Jessica Capshaw), an effervescent and brilliant pediatric surgeon with whom she quickly strikes up a relationship. The two ultimately get married and have a child — during time apart, Callie sleeps with Mark and ends up pregnant with his child, which she raises with Arizona and Mark until his death in Season 9 — but in that season’s finale, Arizona cheats on Callie after a difficult period in their marriage. (In the Season 8 finale, Arizona ends up in a plane crash with several other doctors; Callie elects to amputate her wife’s leg due to the severity of her injuries, and Arizona never truly forgives her.) Despite trying to repair their relationship, Arizona and Callie get divorced and Callie eventually starts dating surgical resident Penny Blake (Samantha Sloyan) — and after a nasty custody battle over their daughter Sofia, Arizona keeps Sofia, Callie and Penny split, and Callie moves to New York. (Don’t worry; when Capshaw left the show after Season 14, it’s revealed that Arizona and Sofia move to New York to be closer to Callie.)

In May of 2016, the day that “Grey’s Anatomy” aired its Season 12 finale, Sara Ramírez revealed in a statement that they were officially leaving the series originally created by Shonda Rhimes in 2005. “I’m deeply grateful to have spent the last 10 years with my family at Grey’s Anatomy and ABC, but for now I’m taking some welcome time off,” the statement read, which was obtained by outlets like Us Weekly. “Shonda been incredible to work for, and we will definitely continue our conversations!”

According to Rhimes herself, this was a pretty big surprise … in that she didn’t have a whole lot of advance notice regarding Ramírez’s decision and the move to New York wasn’t actually meant to write Callie off the series. “I found out maybe three days before you guys [the public] found out,” Rhimes told the audience at New York Magazine’s Vulture Festival a few days after Ramírez’s announcement. “It wasn’t a big, planned thing. I had a different plan going and then Sara came and said, ‘I really need to take a break.’ I was sort of lucky that we had shot the end of the season with her going to New York.”

Since leaving “Grey’s Anatomy,” Ramírez has continued bringing queer characters into the mainstream, often performing on-screen as non-binary characters; they did so as Kat Sandoval in the Téa Leoni drama “Madam Secretary” and also spent two seasons on the “Sex and the City” sequel “And Just Like That” as the abrasive queer standup comedian and podcaster Che Diaz. If you want to relive their glory days as Callie Torres — one of the most visible gay women on television and one of the longest-running queer characters in the medium’s history — “Grey’s Anatomy” is streaming on Netflix and Hulu now.