Medical drama TV doesn’t get any better than The Pitt. This show (on Max) impresses me so much I am compelled to post again about it. Not only is it getting the medicine right, it gets the human drama right, and it honors health care workers with sentiment, not sentimentality. In other words, the emotions are not sappy or sugary, they are honest, earned. Noah Wylie (Dr. Robby) and the cast are simply fantastic. Those who watched him on ER years ago as Carter, a young intern, have to be proud of the grace he displays today as the ED attending.
There is so much I could write about this week’s episode (8), but I just want to focus on one segment. An old black man is brought in with a low heart rate that turns out to be because the wire’s of his pacemaker have become detached. The ED staff inserts a temporary pacemaker and scheduled him for surgery the next day for a permanent pacemaker repair. While they are treating him, he asks questions that suggest he has extensive medical knowledge and Dr. Robby asks him if he is a doctor, which makes the man chuckle. No, he’s just a postman. He digs a little deeper and then it eventually comes out that the man worked for Freedom House. Freedom House. Dr. Robby knows what that means. Dr. Robby brings some EMS crews into the room, and introduces them to the man and then he and the patient give them a history lesson about Freedom House, a group of black men who were trained to take care of patients in the field and bring them to the hospital. They became the foundation of today’s 911 system. What a wonderful history lesson, and a deserved honor to those largely forgotten men and the doctors who organized them.
You can read more about Freedom House in this recent book American Sirens: The Incredible Story of the Black Men Who Became America’s First Paramedics by noted EMS author Kevin Hazzard.
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