The Pitt

The screen goes dark and the credits roll.

“Could we maybe watch something else?” Jesse asked me. “That kind of stressed me out.”

I had already clicked the next episode, but his desire was understandable, considering we had just finished two straight hours of The Pitt, a medical show about a group of healthcare workers during a realistic day shift in an emergency room. My friend Kelley, who recommended it to me and works in emergency medicine, had said it was the most realistic medical show she’d ever seen. The beginning of the show initially felt slow to me, lacking major plotlines and gripping hooks like the Grey’s Anatomy flair I was expecting. With realism at the core of its narrative, the entire first season takes place over one day, with each episode as an hour of the fifteen-hour shift. But as I consumed more of the show, I found myself pulled into a hyperfixative trance. This show was so good. There was obvious character development and a growing understanding of the setting with each scene, but something more intangible pulled me into the show for hours at a time. 

“I don’t know why I love that medical show so much,” I later said to him, while tuning my snowboard, feverishly scraping fresh wax off the bottom surface.

He pointed to a spot I’d missed from the glare of the lamp behind us, his hand steadying the small of my back. “I think maybe it has something to do with your trauma.”

“Yeah.” I brushed the wax shavings to the edge of the board and sent them fluttering to the carpet like snowflakes. “I was actually thinking about that.”

And I was, but I didn’t have the language for it. I didn’t trust myself enough to validate the feeling. Until then, I couldn’t fully understand my fascination. Sensitive to gore and graphic medical procedures on screen, I often looked away or covered my eyes during incisions, surgeries, births, close shots on organs, and bloody scenes. There was something morbidly alluring about the death scenes, particularly the ones where family members first absorbed the news about their loved one. The shock, betrayal, anger, and devastation were all familiar feelings inside my body, but seeing it outside of me, through repeated scenes, was strangely gratifying. I felt like I was reliving something I never got to fully understand. 

The scene goes like this: Doctor sits down with person or people. Doctor breaks the news, bluntly, then says I am so very sorry.  Person or people experience denial, anger, shock. Doctor says we did everything we could. Then there is crying or shouting or something like that. Doctor walks out of the room as cries echo in the background.

For eight years, I had been suppressing a belief that the doctors didn’t try hard enough to save my dad. I remember the feeling well. Walking into that nauseating hospital room and thinking: they didn’t even try to save him. He’d still be here if they did. I never knew what happened before I arrived at that hospital. I received fragments of information from the fragments my mom received – CPR, my dad coming in and out of consciousness, his heart stopping, my mom whispering goodbye. I never got the damn details. I was left to imagine – only I didn’t imagine. I didn’t think about what transpired in that emergency room in his final moments. I didn’t have language or imagery or medical knowledge to even begin understanding what might have happened. For the first time in eight years, The Pitt gave me a semblance of reality, a foundation to unearth the part of my trauma I left the most untouched.