Tomorrow is Thursday and I am sad that The Pitt has finished its season 1 run of 15 episodes and there are no new episodes to watch. While I have a few criticisms of the show, overall, I thought it was the best medical TV show ever and among my top 5 favorites of any TV series (behind The Wire, Breaking Bad, Homicide: Life on the Streets, and Yellowstone). It focuses on the medicine and what the job does to people, rather than on the melodramas of who is sleeping with who. There are two other Emergency Department based TV series now — The Pulse on Netflix and Berlin ER on Apple. I found them both unwatchable. The Pulse actually had a paramedic as a character, but’s her early promise turned into disappointment as she ended up seducing and sleeping with the doctor who treated her for her job related injury.
The only issue I had with Pitt was overdoing the dramatic with out of the box life-saving cowboy treatments, which overshadowed the true drama of the ED. When the ED was overrun with scores of severely injured patients, a doctor would attempt a procedure. Another doctor would tell them not to do it because it would kill the patient. The first doctor would respond, but if I don’t do it the patient will die.
This is what I’m talking about:
“Without a bougie you could create a false passage on top of the trachea and kill him…”
“But if you hit the esophagus, he’s toast, you told us to never pass a tube unless you see the vocal chords.”
You can’t do an IJ without an ultrasound especially on a guy this big.” “You’ll kill him if you collapse a lung or hit the carotid.”
What are you doing? Are you crazy? Did Abbott approve this.’
“He said do what you have to do.”
“It’ll cut off the blood supply to have her body.”
Each case ended in rock star success.
An attending doctor says to the intern doctor there on her first day who without authorization in the chaos of the mass casualty performs a complicated temporary procedure called a REBOA (Resuscitative Endovascular Balloon of the Aorta), where a balloon is put in the aorta to cut off blood flow to half the body in hopes of saving the patient from severe hemorrhaging. “You never should have done that ever, do you understand? But that was pretty badass, you saved her life, good job!”
Add to this, drilling a hole in a guy’s head with an IO to relieve intracranial pressure and it was too much for me. One or two spectacular saves would have been fine, but with as many as they had it detracted from the reality of the ED and the seriousness of the show.
I was talking with an ED doctor friend who has been watching the show, and he said what he liked best was the way the Pitt was true not so much to the medicine of the ED, but to the emotions of the ED.
Anyway, I shouldn’t be negative at all about the show, which was great, and I can’t wait for the next season. I just hope they don’t go overboard again with too much cowboy medicine.