I’m A Doctor. We Need To Talk About A Deeply Troubling Part Of The Pitt.

“What keeps TV medical personnel staying on the job through illness, injury and trauma is a script to follow and a show to produce. For us, real-life healthcare professionals, it’s more complicated.”

In Season 1 of The Pitt, Dr. Heather Collins has a miscarriage in an employee restroom... and goes back to work. Charge nurse Dana Evans vows to leave her position after getting sucker punched by a patient... but doesn’t. What keeps TV medical personnel staying on the job through illness, injury and trauma is a script to follow and a show to produce. For us, real-life healthcare professionals, it’s more complicated.

When I was a 21-year-old nursing student, I waited until my day off to visit my doctor about my abdominal pain and vaginal bleeding. I was diagnosed with a pelvic infection, given a shot of antibiotics and told to return if things didn’t improve. When Monday rolled around, I wasn’t improved, but rather than go to my doctor, I went to work.

I cared for my patients through pain and bleeding, but when I started struggling for breath, I finally checked myself into the emergency department. There, an ultrasound showed a ruptured ectopic pregnancy with blood accumulating in my abdominal cavity. I needed emergency surgery. I was wheeled through the hospital halls — past the classmates I had been working with less than an hour before. No one seemed shocked.

Shouldn’t it have been more surprising that a healthcare worker would drag herself to her post while actively haemorrhaging? Although some of it might be explained by my own blind trust — told it was a simple infection, I chose to soldier on — the larger piece that cannot be ignored is the culture that pervades healthcare. The hidden curriculum, the unspoken expectation, is that we show up for our patients no matter what.

Residency wasn’t much better. There, we had a saying: “If you call in sick, you’d better have a hospital room and vent settings.” You were expected to work through all but the most life-threatening illnesses. Hence, the stretcher ride through........

© HuffPost