Max’s new medical drama “The Pitt” has become a sleeper hit for its heart-pounding take on emergency room doctors and nurses trying to save lives during a shift from hell.
While the first season of the show takes place over one shift in the fictional Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital, the lead character shares his tragic connection to New Orleans in one episode.
Dr. Michael Robinavitch, played by actor Noah Wyle, oversees the day shift at the hospital in the show. Called Dr. Robby by his co-workers, the physician shares a story from his past about his medical residency in New Orleans’ Charity Hospital in the ninth episode of the show.
Warning: there are spoilers ahead for one of “The Pitt’s” most devastating moments.
In the eighth episode, the doctors are unable to save 6-year-old Amber, who was brought to the hospital after drowning in a pool. She is the youngest patient the team, which includes a few young medical students on their first day, has lost so far during the shift and her death hits them particularly hard.
The next episode begins in the aftermath of Amber’s death — each episode covers an hour of the shift — and Dr. Robby decides to huddle the doctors to debrief and try to impart some advice about handling the deaths of young patients.
Dr. Robby, who has unaddressed trauma from years as an ER doctor and first responder to the COVID-19 pandemic, basically gives a lesson about “how to literally bury your feelings,” as charge nurse and team mom Dana Evans later informs him.
Dr. Robby begins to tell an anecdote from his first day at “Big Charity.” He says that he had a 5-year-old patient who was accidentally shot by his brother — and the boy didn’t make it.
As Dr. Robby starts to relive the memory of losing the boy, he begins to trail off.
“I found myself back at the gates of Big Charity Cemetery, and I’m looking at all those mausoleums and those crypts, and I’m thinking to myself, ‘OK, that’s what I need. I just need a safe place where I can put these feelings.'”
Dr. Robby is about to lose the plot of his story when he gets interrupted by a security guard barging in to tell the doctors about another crisis at the hospital, and the doctors have to get back to another hour in the ER.
The abandoned Charity Hospital building on Tulane Avenue
Photo by Chris Granger / The Times-Picayune
It’s fitting that the haunted Dr. Robby would have his residency at Charity Hospital.
The former teaching hospital on Tulane Avenue has a long history in New Orleans, with its first iteration dating back to the 1730s and its most recent art deco landmark building coming online in 1939.
The hospital closed after Hurricane Katrina in 2005, a decision that remains controversial among New Orleans residents. The space has been used to film movies and TV shows in the past decade, and Tulane University is most recently working to revive the building as a mixed-use space for offices, labs and apartments.
