The Pressure Will Make You Feel

*Note: This includes spoilers for the first season of the HBO show The Pitt

Screenshot of the Mariah Carey Video "Breakdown,”which inspired this post in a way

Part I: Do you cling to your pride and sing “I will survive”

On the recommendation of a few friends and curiosity about one of my friend’s experiences working as an emergency room as part of their rotations as a new doctor, I decided to check out the Emmy-awarded HBO medical show The Pitt; probably the only other medical (comedy?) drama I’ve watched since House, M.D., which had a totally different vibe than this show. I was actually hesitant to start the Pitt because I was told that it’s very intense, gross, and functions as a damning critique of many American systems and facets of society, including corporotizaion of medical care (which ironically also includes the underfunding of the same care), the normalization of violence in public spaces, the dearth of mental health care access and anti-vax parents, among other things.

With all these things happening in real life and affecting my life, I have been trying to watch lighter and sillier things because I need to protect my peace somehow. However, my curiosity got the best of me. I decided to check out an episode here and there, and then ended up binging the last three, and probably most intense episodes (about mass shootings) on the same day, yet another high school shooting happened, and a certain right-wing podcaster was shot (also at a school). 

I chose to keep watching partially because I will always finish off a show, no matter what I think about it, including hate watching (I’m looking at you Girls), partially because of the performances of the actors, and partially because I felt a strong resonance to the depiction of pressure, especially the pressure that Noah Wyle’s Dr. Michael Robinavitch (In-universe nicknamed Dr. Robby and the portrayal won Wyle his first Emmy award for best actor) grapples with throughout the 15 hour shift ER shift we are witness to. While I know the Pitt itself is fictional, the medical profession is very much real, and from what I’ve read, actual medical professionals were involved with the creation of the show to make it more of a realistic depiction of an ER shift. 

I was also, at times, live texting the doctor I mentioned above to ask her about the accuracy of the medical terms and procedures and grossness (but I was afraid to ask about the pressure of having to save lives) because it just seemed so chaotic and unmanageable and made me think that while I do work with chaos and unpredictability, I realized that I probably made the right decision not to purse an MD because I can’t turn my empathy off for individuals. I would definitely be psychically destroyed by failing to save someone’s life, which does indeed happen to Dr. Robby towards the end of the season.

Part II: Do you lash out and say “How dare you leave this way”

Scene from The Pitt

Although I’m no doctor (although I’m in the process of becoming a non-medical one), I was struck by and resonated deeply with the sort of pressure he felt; as a manager, as someone who has lost many people to COVID, and as someone who has failed in their responsibilities to others. On the day depicted in the first season of The 

Pitt, it is the fourth anniversary of the death of Dr. Robby’s mentor, Dr. Adamson, who died of COVID-19 during the early days of the pandemic. According to his colleagues, he seemed pretty surly and out of character and we are able to see, throughout the season, how that trauma (and not dealing with it) reaches a breaking point after failing to save a young shooting victim who he has a personal connection to.

My job is not as intimately connected to pandemics and shootings as a medical professional, but in my role at an environmental justice organization as a director and as an environmental/climate (researcher? Scientist? Advocate?) person, a person who works at a school, and a Black person, those issues have had unfortunately significant impacts on my life, especially in the last few years. For instance, one of my aunts, and my father’s last sibling suddenly died in April 2020 from COVID, which irrevocably altered the relationships between my parents, and my father and myself. And because I live in Brooklyn and most of my family is in Chicago, we were not able to hold a funeral or really come to terms with how her death affected us collectively.  

In addition my Aunt Frances‘ sudden death, I also lost about 12-15 members of my family along with people close to me within 18 months. All of those people were Black, because as the saying goes: “In America, if white people get the sniffles, Black people get pneumonia," which, in this case became more literal than metaphorical. In light of this, I was expected in my role as the sole Black person in leadership at my job to talk about how COVID and other environmental risk factors have deeper and more grievous impacts on marginalized communities; like the one I am from, and of course indigenous, latino, and immigrants. 

Unlike Dr. Robby, I did (and still do) have a therapist. Still, unlike Dr. Robby, I felt the responsibility of supporting discriminatory behaviors in our workplace towards my Black colleagues, while also representing that workplace as an entity that is serious about supporting EJ communities during times of ongoing disaster. Before 2020, while I can’t say I was the most emotionally open person, I could at least cry (I cried watching multiple Fast and Furious movies), but after August of 2020, unfortunately, I haven’t been able to shed a single tear. That’s why I was so surprised that I was so affected by Wyle’s performance when he broke down after a long day of work as a teacher, mentor, and manager while also doing the job of saving 120 or so lives. My work is nowhere near as intense as what we see in the show, but I also have a deep fear of losing myself to the pent-up feelings of failure, grief, and not being good enough to help the people and the communities I feel responsible for. 

Part III: Do you hold on in vain as they just slip away?

I don’t think I am at that breaking point yet, but how does one know when the built-up pressure in a pipe will finally burst? While I have supportive people in my life, there are sadly people who I need to engage with that question my ability to represent my community, people that actively diminish my accomplishments, and that deny my lived experience from places of malice, ignorance, lack of care, or a mixture of those. I am grateful for everyone who has supported me, but the former group of people, especially the ones I have to interact with, only add to that pressure; it feels as if they want me to fail so that they can say, “See, I knew I was right about him.” 

With that in mind, I will admit that I am afraid to ask my friend what the pressure is for her to work in such a high-stakes field as medicine, specifically, emergency medicine. While we primarily follow Dr. Robby, we also glimpse how the maelstrom of America’s faults converges in an ER setting and what it does to other doctors, nurses, patients, and their loved ones. Although it appears she left the show, I would have loved to see what a day focused on Tracy Ifeachor’s Dr. Collins would be like, or what it is like for the lone social worker, Kiara (played by Krystel V. McNeil), who not only has to tell the parents of patients that their child has died, but also makes herself available for the medical staff to process their feelings and stresses. Who can she go to when things get too much for her?

All that is to say that I am looking forward to seeing what the second season will bring, and I am glad that people pushed me to watch it. If nothing else, I think it was helpful to see what it looks like for someone with unrealistic expectations of themself to try and fulfill self-imposed standards that would be unfair to ask of anyone else. It also helped remind me that compassion always has to go both ways. The only reason Robby was able to get back up and go back to work was because the words of compassion and self-care that he told one of his medical students earlier in the shift were repeated back to him after the loss of a patient: “If you learn to live with it and accept it, you can find balance.” However, sometimes we will fall, and the best we can hope for is that someone else is there to help us get back up.