In the pits with "The Pitt"
Who the hell finds comfort and calm in other people's emergencies?
(This post contains vague spoilers for the shows “The Pitt,” as well as potentially upsetting medical descriptions.)
I was home alone this past week—my first time staying in my partner and I’s apartment without them there. Just Nova, my Golden-Aussie, and I bopping around, trying to pass each day via strings of mundane tasks. I kinda don’t do well alone. Like, it’s nice that no one can see the person I am when I am alone…but that’s not the same as really enjoying being alone, y’know? The dishes piled up in the sink (my partner usually washes them). I stayed up until 2am almost every night (3am one night), sans the regulation of my partner’s bedtime routines. I ate like shit because cooking for one sucks. I sighed a lot. My dog sighed a lot, too—her only sign of judgment.
I’m prone to falling into these pits of aloneness (different from being depressed, different from feeling lonely), so my therapist and I tried to come up with a plan for how to deal with this week. I would hang out with friends, engage in my hobbies, and be intentional with each day as much as I could.
I made plans to walk around a cute park with the one (1) friend I have in this new city (it was a lovely time, plus she brought her fresh baby so I got to coo over their little baby fingers and little baby nose, which can heal you a lot, I think). I video chatted with my friends as we played Animal Crossing and shared photos of the sky from our respective locations around the world (did you know the sun doesn’t set until after 10pm in Estonia this time of year?).
Despite my efforts, my plans for human interaction only accounted for about 6 hours of the week. I spent the rest of the 162 hours sleeping, playing video games, watching TikToks, walking Nova around the cornfields (the cows are out to pasture now that it’s summer and boy are they confusing to her), reading “What My Bones Know,” and watching the HBO Max1 show, The Pitt.
I didn’t want to watch The Pitt. I generally find procedurals about emergency services to be either incredibly boring, too stressful, or straight-up authoritarian propaganda. I’ve never watched ER, Grey’s Anatomy, or Cops. I loved Brooklyn 99 despite it being bootlicker bait because I’m bisexual and Andre Braugher (RIP) was a perfect actor. Otherwise? I don’t care about “hero” shows.
But I can’t emphasize how fucking boring living in a new city is when 1) it’s not that big and 2) you only know a couple people (one of whom is out of town). I had nothing else to do. Plus, I’d been hearing a lot about The Pitt from different culture writers and podcasters for a while, so my curiosity started to bubble. It wasn’t until a mutual of mine (shout out Alaina) posted about liking it that I begrudgingly logged into HBO to see what all the hubbub was about. I took out my coloring book and markers, snuggled into the corner of my couch, and pressed start on Episode 1.
I proceeded to color 3 pages and watch The Pitt for 5 hours straight.
If you’re gonna watch this show, I highly recommend it while doing a meditative activity that can lower stress, because The Pitt is a nonstop assault of stressful and traumatic sequences. Unless you’re comfortable rawdogging moments like a young, student doctor trying to save the life of an older Black man suffering from heart failure on his watch. It’s definitely not for everyone.
The pace is actually insane, and it’s captured so well. Each 45-minute episode represents one hour of a single shift in the ER at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital. There are one-shots that move seamlessly from two doctors dealing with an emergency, to another doctor running past them because another has just arrived. The acting is a mixed bag of amateur to excellent, but you care about every character. The writers clearly wanted to show what a modern hospital that cares about modern things looks like (for example, doctors recognizing the pain of Black women…a new concept). There are no heroes, no villains…just people hurting, helping, and trying to heal.
Like I said, this isn’t my type of show. If I’m potentially gonna feel stressed out while watching TV, I want it to be about things I don’t have to actually worry about, like zombies or winning a chef competition (ya girl can barely cook). I’d taken out the coloring book in preparation for being upset and triggered by The Pitt. So imagine my deep fucking concern when I binged a show that features the drowning death of a young girl and a mass shooting and felt…comforted?
I didn’t expect watching The Pitt to remind me of my childhood.2 And I definitely didn’t expect it to give me something to look forward to during this period of aloneness.
My ex-dad3 was a charge nurse at the busiest ER in the state of Minnesota for most of my life. Even now, I could pick out the exact shade of blue of his nursing scrubs in a color lineup. He would come home from work hours after we’d gotten back from school, tired, but ready to greet us with a small smile if his shift had gone alright. He disappeared into his bedroom or sat in front of the TV, scrubs still on and a Stella Artois in hand, if it hadn’t.
To my mom’s disdain, I would often ask him about work over dinner:
“A man came in with his hand in a bag of ice,” he declared as we ate spaghetti. I gasped with fascinated horror. “He got into a fight with a guy with a machete.” I slurped my noodles, eyes wide. “You can’t reattach it after too long.”
“A kid died…snowmobiling accident.” We solemnly passed around Hawaiian sweet rolls. “Don’t ever get on those things. Especially not without a helmet,” he said gruffly. Nods around the table. Silence. “He was almost your age.”
“Nothing too bad today…a guy came in blind drunk and tried to pee on us!” We laughed over my mom’s fried chicken. “And there were a couple of people who came in because they got shot. Luckily, most of the bullets went clean through without nicking anything.” I dug into the mashed potatoes. “There was a baby with a fever…she arrived right before my shift ended, but we got her in a good place before I left.”
I’ve heard hundreds of these stories…imagined them all in my child’s mind’s eye (if you ended up in that ER between the years 2000 and 2017, that sucks but it gave me something to talk about with my ex-dad so, thanks, I guess). Watching The Pitt as I colored in whimsical drawings of plants and dragons was the closest I’ve been in many years to those dinners as a kid—the comfort of living the mundanity of my life while taking in the chaos of someone else’s. Slowly building up the ability/curse to dissociate from the idea of pain…my own and others’. This was one of the first kinds of storytelling that deeply changed me.
When a friend apologizes for bringing up a bodily function or something “gross” while we eat, I laugh and tell them I grew up listening to barely-censored ER stories over dinner. Very little makes me squeamish. I’m not afraid of needles or the sight of blood. When an older man passed out next to me at a party I was at last year, I immediately began to give instructions to the shocked attendees around me on how to help me keep him stable until EMS showed up:
“Open the windows, please, we need air moving in here. And turn on an oscillating fan, if you’ve got one? Hey, dude, you’re awake. No, no, don’t try and get up or you might pass out. Can someone grab a cool, but not ice cold, rag for me, please? Ope, he’s gone again. Folks on the couch, toss some pillows over so we can elevate his head. Who’s calling 911? Great, tell them he’s fainted twice, and responsive but lethargic when he’s awake. Hey, friend, you’re back! Sorry, I gotta keep you lying down. Don’t be embarrassed, it’s okay. Yo, keep an eye out for EMS and someone grab the cats. Did you do anything out of the usual today? Besides pass out twice? Ha, got you to laugh. It’s okay.”
One of the attendees—an actual doctor—later told me he didn’t take over because I was so calm and already doing exactly what he would’ve done. I felt proud hearing that. I knew there had been a time that my ex-dad would’ve been proud to hear that too, and wondered if that’s why I felt that way.
In another life, where I don’t hate my ex-dad (a story for another time), I’m probably a nurse or street medic. Instead, I’m just a woman who stays calm during other people’s emergencies, watches closely while the nurse draws her blood, and feels comforted while watching The Pitt…
Oh well,
Dionne
The Bits
I have to talk to my psychiatrist about trying different ADHD meds because my Adderall is keeping me AWAKE and a girl HATES being awake when she wants to be ASLEEP! I’m listening to the song “Crazy Bitch” by Madelline to do away with any shame or doubt I have about needing to pop pills to function.
My sabbatical is coming to an end, and I’m applying to jobs…why are places still asking anyone to work for less than $18/hr? Get fucked! Couldn’t be me as a boss.
As always, thank you for reading, commenting, and sharing (❁´◡`❁)
HBO rebranded AGAIN. Enough! You’re just HBO! Give up!
Childhood will be the recurring theme of my writing this summer! My memories have been speaking to and teaching me lately, so I simply have to listen.
Ex-dad (n.): a person you once called dad but no longer has that title in your life due to divorce, estrangement, their own shitty decisions, etc.