Who Had The Craziest First Day on ‘The Pitt’?

Your first day at a new job can be rough. But arguably no one has ever had a rougher first day than the new students and residents clocking in for their first 15-hour shift working the ER on The Pitt. HBO Max’s sleeper-hit series follows one crazy day at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital ER where a crop of new doctors and veterans led by Noah Wyle’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch have to treat everything from broken bones, to drug overdoses, to victims a mass shooting at a music festival.

Dr. Robby’s first day triggered a full-blown panic attack, so it’s no surprise that the four fresh-faced doctors and medical students—Dr. Mel King (Taylor Dearden), Dr. Trinity Santos (Isa Briones), Dennis Whitaker (Gerran Howell), and Victoria Javadi (Shabana Azeez)—had struggles of their own. Now that season one of The Pitt has come to an end, let’s see which of The Pitt newbies had the craziest first day.

Dr. Mel King

Of the newbies, Dr. King comes into The Pitt the most prepared, having worked in a VA hospital as a second-year resident. Still, she is in for one hell of a first day in The Pitt. Early in the shift, she confidently diagnoses a leg fracture—but misses signs of a compartment syndrome that turns into a near amputation, which rattles her. Dr. King also must contend with the brief disappearance of her elderly patient’s caretaker, a single daughter exhibiting signs of caretaker fatigue. She also has to break the news to Bella, a five-year-old girl, that her older sister drowned saving her after she fell into a pool. This is particularly devastating for Dr. King, as she is the primary caregiver for her autistic younger sister, but her experience makes her the best person to deliver the horrific news.

Dr. King’s first day isn’t only sob stories, however. She bonds with senior resident Dr. Frank Langdon (Patrick Ball), who knows his way around The Pitt maybe a little too well (more on that later). They share an unexpected, teachable moment when Dr. King is able to connect with an autistic patient, Terrence, in a way that Dr. Langdon can’t because she herself is neurodivergent.

When a mass shooting occurs, Dr. Mel volunteers for triage and donates her own blood to keep a patient with liver damage alive when the hospital’s blood bank has run out. At the end of her shift, King is confronted by a surprising ethical dilemma when a young boy is brought in, having contracted measles and probably acute disseminated encephalomyelitis (ADEM) and is in desperate need of a spinal tap. His parents, particularly his mother, are staunchly against the procedure. Dr. Mel ends the day picking up her younger sister.

Dr. Trinity Santos

Confident to the point of cocky, Dr. Santos comes into The Pitt as a new intern, raring and ready to go. She quickly learns she’s got a lot to learn about bedside manner. She pokes fun at new medical students Victoria and Whitaker, giving them the mean-spirited nicknames “Crash” and “Huckleberry” that play on their insecurities. But soon, Dr. Santos gets a dose of her own medicine, when her overeagerness leads to her dropping a scalpel into surgical resident Dr. Yolanda Garcia’s (Alexandra Metz) foot. Smooth move, Santos.

However, her confidence and intuition are spot-on with Dr. Langdon. Santos noticed that the pill count wasn’t adding up for patients that Dr. Langdon had worked on, leading her to believe that Dr. Langdon was stealing pills from the hospital for personal use. It didn’t help matters that Dr. Langdon clearly wasn’t a fan of Dr. Santos or her brash attitude. At first, Dr. Santos missteps and tells Dr. Garcia about her theory that Langdon is stealing pills, only to be met with rage and a warning to watch her step as a new resident. Sure of herself, Dr. Santos brings up Dr. Langdon and the potential pill thievery to Dr. Robby, who, following Dr. Santos’s advice, questions Langdon and discovers she was right all along.

She’s also an incredibly skilled doctor who makes some crucial, lifesaving calls over the course of her first day. Dr. Santos makes a quick call to stop an MDMA overdose patient from seizing, injecting them with saline, and angering Dr. Langdon, but saving the patient’s life. With no senior physicians available, she takes the initiative to perform a resuscitative endovascular balloon occlusion of the aorta (REBOA) to stop a patient’s bleeding, which gets her a reprimand from a night-shift senior attending Dr. Jack Abbot (Shawn Hatosy), as well as praise for the procedure’s success.

While Dr. Santos’s demeanor might not make her the most popular intern in the hospital, by the end of her first day, we get deeper insight into why she is so intense. Earlier in the day, Santos goes rogue and verbally threatens a male patient with a neck injury whose wife had been drugging his coffee with estrogen because she believed that he was molesting their daughter. By the end of the season we learn that Dr. Santos is a survivor of abuse, and lost a friend to suicide.

Dennis Whitaker

Has anyone gone through more scrubs in one day than fourth-year med student Dennis Whitaker? He gets a number of gross substances—blood, pee, vomit, you name it—all over his scrubs, causing him to go through four pairs in a single day. That’s gotta be a hospital record.

If that weren’t enough, Whitaker experienced a traumatic event to kick off his first day. After bonding with his first patient, a jovial man named Mr. Milton, Whitaker finds him unresponsive in the hallway. Whitaker and Dr. Robby can’t resuscitate Mr. Milton, and he dies, giving Whitaker his first experience losing a patient. It rattles the young aspiring doctor from Nebraska, who Santos dubs “Huckleberry” because of his humble upbringing. But that upbringing proves handy when he is able to capture and kill a rat scurrying around the hospital with his bare hands.

Whitaker’s confidence grows after a shaky start. In a touching corollary to Dr. Robby coaching him through losing that first patient, Whitaker lends Dr. Robby a hand when he himself has a panic attack after losing a patient, his pseudo-son Jake’s girlfriend. He even receives an apology from the unhoused man who peed on him and brought rats into the hospital. The apology and the experience inspire Whitaker to get involved with The Pitt’s street team, which provides services to the unhoused.

By the season’s end, it turns out that Whitaker and the unhoused man have more in common than you’d initially believe. At the end of their 15-hour shift, Dr. Santos discovers that Whitaker has been squatting at the hospital for the last month because he has nowhere to live. Thankfully, Dr. Santos offers Whitaker the spare room in her apartment. A crazy day to be sure, but at least it ended with a new place for Whitaker to crash.

Victoria Javadi

Speaking of crash, Javadi’s day began with a bang, or rather, a thud, when she hit the ground after fainting at the beginning of her shift, earning her the nickname “Crash.” A 20-year-old med student, Javadi’s not old enough to drink, but she’s old enough to provide treatment—and faint—at the sight of a degloved foot.

After the fainting, everything is going relatively smoothly for Javadi until her colleagues learn that her mother is Dr. Eileen Shamsi (Deepti Gupta), a senior attending at the hospital. Victoria is forced to contend with trying to prove herself as a doctor in her own right while simultaneously being patronized by her mother. To make things even more complicated, Javadi finds herself falling for Mateo Diaz (Jalen Thomas Brooks), a handsome nurse who works in The Pitt.

Personal drama aside, Victoria quickly proves that she’s got what it takes to be a doctor in her own right. She independently diagnoses a patient, Dolores Walker, who is experiencing severe abdominal pain. While her mother attributes the symptoms to Crohn’s disease, Victoria discovers that the pain was caused by a black widow spider bite, impressing her mother. By the end of the shift, she’s gotten Mateo to ask her out and is drinking a beer in the park with her colleagues.

While you can make a case for any of the four doctors’ difficult days, Whitaker gets our vote for most distressing first go-round at The Pitt, partly because of all those foul scrubs. While Dr. King gained confidence, Dr. Santos softened up, and Javadi grew up a bit, Whitaker processed the loss of his first patient and got a new home by the end of his shift. That’s a pretty eventful first day on the job.

Now that The Pitt has been renewed for season two, there may be a newer crop of newbies scrubbing in on July 4: What could go wrong?