Season 2, Episode 11: ‘5:00 P.M.’
This is not a pleasant episode of “The Pitt.” That is a compliment. Much of what transpires in the E.R. of Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center between 5 and 6 p.m. on this sweltering July 4 is deeply unpleasant.
Flaring tempers and fractured trust alienate colleague from colleague. Overconfidence bordering on arrogance leads to an avoidable crisis. Role models fail their students. A child nearly loses his life, as does his despondent mother. It’s a tough, tense hour.
But I’ve never felt the mood in Dr. Robby’s department shift the way it did when a new patient, Pranita (Ramona DuBarry), was brought in by I.C.E. agents. She is suffering from injuries incurred when they raided the restaurant where she worked, in pursuit of President Trump’s draconian mass-deportation policy.
She is not allowed to contact her daughter to tell her where she is. She is not allowed to tell the hospital staff so they may do so on her behalf. In the end, she is not even allowed to wear the sling she is prescribed to help her damaged arm.
The agents’ rough handling of Pranita proves to be too much for Nurse Jesse, who tries to intervene. Suddenly, the sounds of struggle and shouting can be heard throughout the department. Within seconds, Pranita and Jesse are being led away in zip ties by the agents. They refuse to say what Jesse did that merits his detention, or where he and Pranita will be detained.
The whole incident seems to stem from when Robby dresses down one of the agents, who is still wearing his gaiter, for the chaos their presence has caused in the hospital. Dozens of patients and staff have fled, fearing their immigration status will lead the agents to target them, too. Sick people are not getting the treatment they need, Robby says, and they will go home to get even sicker, forced to return when it may be too late. At the same time, much-needed professionals are no longer around to do their jobs. Raising his voice and dropping an expletive, Robby asks them to take their prisoner and get going as soon as they can before they make things worse.
“No problem, doc,” the agent responds, a little too softly. He has Jesse on the ground in his next scene.
As with this season’s earlier story line about the boy whose parents were deported to Haiti, the visit from I.C.E. stands out because of how intractably it presents to medical professionals. If someone comes in those doors with an eyelid glued shut or a leg chopped in half, the staff knows how to spring into action. When a patient’s chief complaint is caused by the masked federal officers who brought her there, the anger and frustration radiates from people like Robby, Dana and McKay in waves you can all but see.
These are not people who are used to being helpless, or to seeing the oath they live by — first, do no harm — made into a mockery right in their own workplace. When they look around the E.R. and see empty beds where patients once waited for care, or watch valued colleagues get roughed up and hauled away, harm is all they see being done.
Even without I.C.E.’s presence, anger is pervasive in this week’s episode. Mel blows up at her sister, Becca, over her sexual relationship, eventually confiding in the ever-empathetic Dana that she is worried Becca will find love, get married and leave her on her own.
Santos finally has it out with Langdon. There’s a reason she isn’t buying his apology tour: She is the one who caught him stealing meds, a crime neither she nor Robby exposed and for which he was thus never punished. Now she has to watch him be welcomed back by everyone with open arms, making her look like the bad guy. She’ll believe he is serious about making amends when he lets everyone know that what really caused him to step away was drug theft, which would cost him his medical license. Until then, she wants nothing to do with him.
Robby’s sharpest anger is reserved for the I.C.E. agents, but as the time of his sabbatical grows ever closer — Al-Hashimi is hoping he won’t choose to stay late — he seems to grow more and more temperamental. He chews out McKay for treating a drug-addicted homeless woman in a nearby park when she was supposed to be on duty. He is especially angry because her cancer patient Roxie died while McKay was outside.
Elsewhere, Ogilvy’s hubris nearly costs a patient his life because he failed to order a routine ultrasound. It’s hard not to feel at this point that the student doctor deserved some comeuppance. Instead, Robby lets the arrogant Ogilvy off the hook and explodes again at Mohan for bringing her outside stress into the job and failing to catch her student’s mistake. Robby’s discovery that his friend Duke has an unidentified but potentially serious swelling in his chest cavity will not improve his mood.
The emergency room can be a hard, hard place to be, even when minor miracles happen. A panicked mother (Cathryn Dylan Ortiz) comes tearing into the ambulance bay in her S.U.V. with her unconscious, overheated son, who she says became locked in the vehicle while she was gardening. Various staff members fear the worst. Joy suspects the mother shut the boy in the car deliberately. Al-Hashimi calls for a pediatric body bag, assuming the child won’t make it. But by the end of the episode, the team’s treatment means the boy is no longer at risk of death
There is no way of knowing yet, however, the extent of any cognitive damage he may have. Upon hearing this, his mother withdraws her comforting hand from his, with his tiny dirty fingernails, as if becoming unmoored from him. The next time Dr. Al can catch up with her, she is wandering into traffic outside, suicidally despondent. It seems clear from how she describes what happened that she is telling the truth and that her son really did become trapped in the car on his own. That does little to assuage her guilt and grief.
There is one last ugly thing to cover in this bracingly ugly episode. Emma, the new nurse, is assaulted by a belligerent patient, who grabs her by the neck behind a closed door when no one is looking. She is the second nurse to be roughed up this episode; it’s just that the first time, it was by an agent of the U.S. government.
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