The Pitt

Wed, 01 Jul 2026 23:44:09 +0300

After finishing the excellent HBO Max show Hacks recently I was in dire need of something new to watch. I haven’t watched too many hospital series, but somehow I ended up selecting The Pitt – and pretty much binged it. 🍿

The Pitt is a show about the understaffed Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Center and how the staff navigates the unexpected patients and events. It is a teaching hospital, so the staff includes medical students of various experience, and the older students help supervise the younger ones. There are a lot of characters, each with their own faults; doctors, students, nurses, and patients alike.

Each season focuses on a single 12-hour shift so that each episode corresponds to one hour. The “previously on the Pitt” sections at the start of each episode are genuinely helpful, because there are so many patients so that if one of them has been waiting for their lab results for a couple of hours, it means you might have not seen them in a couple of episodes. So in a sense it’s like 24, but there is no ominous ticking clock at any stage.

The show has not been dumbed down too much for the viewers, so that when a patient with, say, a GSW (gun shot wound) comes in, the doctors and nurses go full jargon for quick and effective communication. For example, the staff regularly performs an “EFAST”, which is never explained. I looked it up though, and it stands for Extended Focused Assessment with Sonography for Trauma, i.e. an ultrasound exam where they look for blood or other anomalies in the chest and abdomen. Here’s also a helpful little table of other common medical terms and their meanings:

	Heart rate	Blood pressure	Blood sugar
Too high	Tachycardia	Hypertension	Hyperglycemia
Too low	Bradycardia	Hypotension	Hypoglycemia

If in addition to these you know a few basic medicines, you’ll go a long way with the show:

Ketamine: for sedation and pain relief
Rocuronium, “roc”: temporarily paralyzes the muscles
Lidocaine: local anesthetic for numbing something

Especially the “Ketamine & Roc” combo is something they administer almost every time they need to rapidly intubate someone.

So there you go, a first aid kit of surviving The Pitt! I hope you have a good time with Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch and his team.

TV and movies on Ville Saalo, moi! 👋

The Pitt