The Pitt
7:00 PM
Season 2
Episode 13
Editor’s Rating
5 stars
*****
Photo: Warrick Page/HBO Max
Can we get a round of applause? The night shift has arrived, and boy, do we need these fresh-faced cuties with medical degrees … for several reasons! First, yes, this team rules. Abbot, Shen, Ellis, and Mateo? It is already an abundance of riches, but add in new intern Dr. Nazely Toomarian, who seems quite capable, if green, and senior resident Dr. Crus Henderson, who is … objectively awesome? I mean, when the attendings have a catchphrase for you — “The night shift’s on Crus control” — you’ve already won. We all have. Aside from night shift fangirling, it’s also great these guys are here because holy hell does the day shift need to go home. (Although, I do admit to being tickled by The Pitt reminding us that being an emergency-medicine doctor also includes mundane paperwork.) At best, they’re all physically exhausted, at worst, they are in the middle of various mental-health crises. But even more than simply relieving the day shift, having fresh eyes in the ED is beneficial for both in-world purposes — some of these well-rested doctors might be able to catch a breakdown before it happens — but also it adds a nice little perspective change for the audience, where we can be reminded of how doctors functioning at their best might just look. The comparison is startling!
Take, for instance, Langdon. When teen Grady arrives in the throes of a serious asthma attack, Langdon jumps pretty quickly to a call for intubation. Shen has him slow his roll a little — intubating a person with severe asthma can often lead to cardiac arrest. There are other options they can try first. At first, those other options begin to work, but when suddenly, Grady is struggling again, Langdon rushes in and preps to intubate. This time, it’s Crus who stops him — it’s a pneumothorax. After a quick procedure with a chest tube, Crus has Grady breathing just fine. Langdon realizes how he almost escalated that unnecessarily and the guy looks rattled.
In a sweet little twist on their relationship, it’s Mel who goes to check on Langdon. He wonders if he’s ready to be back. He could have killed Grady; he didn’t even think to check for a pneumothorax. Grady didn’t have any signs of trauma that would point to that, but he should’ve known to consider air trapping. He should have caught it. “We don’t always get everything right the first time,” she reminds him. But she knows, even if it took a minute, he would have caught it. He would have saved Grady. Langdon finally lets on that Robby riding him all day has gotten to him. Mel, who really would prefer it if Langdon stayed on, especially with Robby leaving, has one more piece of advice for her mentor: “That which does not kill me makes me stronger.” And no, she was definitely quoting Nietzsche and not Kelly Clarkson, okay? Even Langdon can crack a smile at that. Will it be enough to keep his confidence up and stop any leanings toward a relapse? Who can say, but if I believe in anything, it’s the power of a well-placed Kelly Clarkson lyric.
You know who could really use their own confidence-boosting pep talk? Samira Mohan. Obviously, we are all worried about Robby (we’ll get to it, people), but after him, the number-two slot on my list of PTMC Medical Personnel for Whom I Am Most Concerned keeps alternating between Santos and Mohan. This hour, it’s Mohan, for sure. After her big win last week with the Cohens, she suffers some major Ls here. Last week’s episode ended with the surprise return of Orlando Diaz, Mohan’s DKA patient who took off. He had a 20-foot fall off a catwalk where he works and has a severe skull fracture. No one wants to say it, but once they discover his DKA is almost gone and could not have been to blame for him fainting, most are thinking this could have been a suicide attempt. The guy was $100,000 in medical debt and repeatedly expressed guilt for what he was putting his family through. It certainly looks like Mohan is processing that possibility.
The good news here is that the chief of neurosurgery, Dr. Conley — played by Mary McCormack, an ER alum (she worked with Wyle’s Dr. Carter during his Darfur stint) — is in the building, and she is a rock star. She’s also a great teacher? She has Javadi — who has to be figuratively and literally pushed by Robby to join — assist her in placing the external ventricular drain in Orlando’s brain. Conley is calm and confident in Javadi the entire time and even makes an “It’s not brain surgery” joke. Orlando is in good hands.
The horrible news, of course, is that an injury like this is accompanied by, uh, troubling statistics: A third of patients will die, and half of them have long-term disability issues. They won’t know Orlando’s prognosis for weeks. Mohan is so spaced out in that trauma room. She knows she tried everything she could to get him to stay, but it wasn’t enough. To make her feel even worse, Orlando’s wife strolls in and it becomes immediately clear that she had no idea her husband even left the hospital. Seeing Mohan realize this in real time is devastating. Seeing Mrs. Diaz take in her now-unconscious husband and learn about the lifelong disability he is going to have is devastating. This whole thing is devastating. And you know who doesn’t make it any better? Noelle. I know she’s just doing her job and trying to be helpful when she tells Mrs. Diaz that this is actually better from a coverage standpoint because Orlando is so badly injured he will qualify, but, like, if we’re going to compare women we know Robby has slept with, Heather Collins would never!!
Unfortunately, before the hour is through, Mohan gets hit with another bad patient outcome. Now that the internet and computer systems have all been restored, most of the day-shift doctors are tasked with entering all of their patient files from the past few hours into the system. Looking for some help with the grunt work, Santos is eager to find Ogilvie, who is still up in surgery watching his not-actually-kidney-stones patient, Mr. Green. She pulls up Mr. Green’s info to see if she can figure out how much longer the med student will be gone and learns that Mr. Green died during surgery about 40 minutes prior. Even more tragic: It says on his chart that he had a CT a year and a half ago, where they found the triple-A, but it was too small for surgery. He was supposed to come back for ultrasounds every six months and never did. If the systems had been up, Ogilvie and Mohan would have seen this right away. Between the cyberattack and newbie Ogilvie not asking the right questions, and Mr. Green not bringing it up, it slipped through the cracks. When Whitaker unknowingly breaks the news to Mohan, she’s shocked and she takes off; hopefully to some safe space to scream. It seems like an occasion for screaming.
Obviously, Mohan isn’t the only one affected by what happened to Mr. Green. While Mohan will push on for a few more hours, Ogilvie, who is found out in the ambulance bay, is barely able to put a sentence together and is still wearing his blood-stained OR gown. He’s told to pack it in for the day, not, however, without a heart-to-heart from Whitaker, who tells the med student about Mr. Milton. Whitaker diagnosed him with gallstones back in season one, but he eventually died of cardiac arrest just waiting on a gurney in the hallway. It’s very full circle to watch Whitaker give Ogilvie a speech about finding balance in order to process and live with all the death they are inevitably going to see working here — just as Robby did for Whitaker. I mean, Ogilvie may still very well give up on emergency medicine, but it’s nice to see the torch of empathy has been fully passed on to the next generation.
Honestly, maybe Robby could use a reminder of some of his old speeches. His crashout remains imminent. In this hour, he gets aggravated watching Mohan give up with the Orlando Diaz situation and Javadi letting fear from past mistakes almost prevent her from taking a great opportunity; he gets vocally and publicly pissed when he learns that Duke has an aortic aneurysm, but the surgeon can’t put him on the schedule for another week; he very loudly talks about his assumption that Orlando attempted suicide; he gets snappy at Dr. al-Hashimi when he notices her freezing up while with a patient and she won’t give him a straight answer about it. The man is a mess. Once he starts slamming things in the middle of the ED, Dana has had enough. Well, let’s be real, the tension left over from their multiple blowouts in the last hour is still very much alive and well, so it’s not like she needed much to tell this fool to go take a walk.
Dana calls him out again for the way he’s been behaving and treating his staff and tells him that if he wants to go, he needs to leave now. Robby’s response this time, however, is much more vulnerable than before. He begins listing the reasons why he can’t just walk out yet and all those reasons are the people. He’s worried about Duke, about Langdon relapsing, about Mohan flaming out, about Javadi giving up on what she’s clearly good at, and he’s worried about Dana. “I’m worried about the people that I care about,” he tells her, fighting for his life not to cry. When she assures him that they will all manage until he comes back, they always do. His response is a swift punch to the gut: “Yeah? What if I don’t come back?” Somebody hold me! I mean, somebody hold Dr. Robby first, but then me next.
• As if The Pitt didn’t already get us fired up enough about what red tape and greed has done to the health-care and health-insurance systems in our country, asthma patient Grady’s mom explains that they haven’t been able to get Grady’s Symbicort inhaler because they lost their Medicaid coverage when the government sent a redetermination letter to their old apartment. And because it was never forwarded, they unknowingly got kicked off. Naomi has been trying to get it reinstated for months, but there are obstacles every step of the way. Out of pocket, the Symbicort would cost $400 a month. It is infuriating. Everyone is infuriated.
• Hey, maybe Crus Henderson could have a second catchphrase: “X-rays? We don’t need no stinkin’ X-rays.” The guy uses an ultrasound to diagnose a couple patients who have been waiting hours to get an X-ray. He is the king of the ultrasound, it seems. Or at least so good he scares Mohan off from competing with him for an ultrasound fellowship. Her list is dwindling.
• During Robby and Dana’s fight, we get a rather clunky info drop for The Pitt: Robby mentions that his mother left him at some point. I guess add abandonment issues to the list of things plaguing this man?
• Admittedly, I loved hearing about why Whitaker loves emergency medicine. It’s both the challenge of it and being there for people on their worst day. Do not hurt this man ever, The Pitt!
• Thirteen episodes in, and Digby is finding new ways to break my dumb heart open. Emma and Dana give him a shave and a haircut and when he sees himself, he starts weeping. How will his family recognize him now? Emma and Dana assure him his family will always recognize them. Earlier, he talked about going to his daughter’s wedding. Emma asks if he danced with his daughter at her wedding. He did. “Then she will always remember you,” she tells him.
• When will Santos just admit that Whitaker is her best friend and she really wants him to continue to live with her? It’s going to feel so good for all of us.
• Robby flipping off Abbot after he gives him eyes about a long good-bye with Noelle forever and ever, please.
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