The first time I watched “ER”, I wasn’t thinking about admissions, throughput metrics, or RVUs. I was a teenager sitting too close to the television, captivated by the rhythm of a hospital that felt urgent and alive. Patients arrived in crisis. Physicians moved quickly. Lives changed in moments both dramatic and quiet.
I wasn’t naive enough to think it was a documentary. But something about it rang true in a way I couldn’t fully articulate at the time. The urgency. The weight of decisions made in seconds. The way physicians and nurses moved through impossible circumstances and kept moving. It gave me a feeling for what the work might actually be. Not the science of it, which I would spend years learning, but the experience of it: the sense that what you did each day could change someone’s life, and that there were people who had chosen to show up for that every day.
I didn’t choose medicine because of a television show. But television helped me picture what medicine could feel like, and that picture stayed with me. I became an EMT, working real shifts with real patients, real chaos, and real grief. I entered medical school certain I would become an emergency physician. Somewhere along the way, Internal Medicine pulled me in a direction I hadn’t anticipated, and Hospital Medicine became the career I hadn’t known I was looking for. I realized what I loved most wasn’t the procedures or even the diagnoses; it was the conversation after. Explaining to a patient what the MRI meant, what the specialist was recommending and why, and what the next few days would likely look like. That moment of clarity, when fear becomes something more manageable, I wanted to be the one who helped them get there.
In my first years after training, before the pandemic, there was a sense of alignment between what I thought medicine would be and what it felt like to practice it.
Then COVID-19 arrived, and something fundamental shifted.
The wards felt heavier. Patients lay isolated behind closed doors. Families said goodbye through screens. We worked through exhaustion, fear, and uncertainty, without the time to process what we were living through. It asked us to make decisions under conditions no training had prepared us for. And then, when it was over, the expectation was that things would resume as before. We were celebrated in April and doubted by September. Some patients thanked us. Others questioned whether we were telling them the truth. The cultural story about physicians kept shifting, and we were still just trying to get through each shift. The mistrust, the burnout, the psychological weight of what we saw and could not always fix: those didn’t resolve when the crisis did. They just became part of the job.
I struggled with this shift. I still do. The practice of medicine felt farther from the calling that had drawn me to it than I ever expected it would.
Recently, though, I began watching “The Pitt”. Like “ER”, it centers on an emergency department rather than a hospital medicine service. Yet what struck me was not the clinical setting; it was the emotional truth. Let me be clear about what I mean when I say the show gets it right. I don’t mean the medicine. Medical dramas have always taken liberties, and “The Pitt” is no exception. What I mean is the atmosphere. The emotional register of the work. The way a shift feels from inside. The weight of it, the pace of it, the specific loneliness of caring deeply in a system that makes caring deeply very difficult.
“The Pitt” follows a single grueling shift in an overcrowded, underfunded emergency department, where clinicians navigate staff shortages, systemic strain, and the psychological weight of post-pandemic practice. What it documents, more faithfully than anything I’ve seen on screen, is the emotional reality of being a physician right now. Not the medicine. The experience of practicing it.
The patient whose guard is up before you’ve said a word. Expectations shaped by the internet, by prior bad experiences, by a cultural narrative that increasingly views physicians with suspicion. The impossible position of being simultaneously a clinician, a social worker, a negotiator, and a target. And then walking out of one room and doing it again in the next. The bureaucratic weight that accumulates between you and the patient you are trying to help.
“The Pitt” shows all of this. And yet it keeps returning to the same gravitational center: physicians doing the right thing for the patient in front of them. Not because the system rewards it. Not because anyone is watching. But because that is what they trained for, and because it matters. Because that is still who we are.
What the show captures, in a way that I have not seen before, is the post-COVID-19 texture of medicine: the weight that did not lift when the pandemic ended; the colleagues who burned out and left; the unprocessed weight of what those years asked of us. The attending physician at the center of “The Pitt” carries that history in every scene of the first season, and watching it, I recognized something I had not named about my own experience of the past several years.
I did not fully understand how much had changed until I tried to explain it to someone outside medicine and found I didn’t have the words.
I have thought about leaving bedside medicine. I still do. I suspect I am not alone. The pull towards telehealth, administration, or non-clinical roles, away from the hardest parts of what we do, is something I understand completely. I have thought through some of those same moves. I hold no judgment toward colleagues who made them, only the recognition that the math of staying gets harder every year.
But watching “The Pitt”, I kept returning to something.
The show is set in an emergency department, not on a medical floor, and the physicians on screen are not hospitalists. And yet so much of what it portrays feels like mine: the time pressure, the skepticism, the gap between what we can offer and what the patients believe we should provide, the feeling of being the bearer of difficult news in a system no one fully trusts anymore. The fragile, recurring decision to keep showing up.
And yet we remain.
We still care for patients at pivotal moments in their lives. We still guide families through fear and uncertainty, sometimes delivering news that will reorder everything they thought they expected for their lives. We still advocate for what is right, even when the system resists. We carry the weight of what we have seen, more than most people will ever know, and still return each day. We still find meaning in helping another human being through illness. Those moments are still there. They are harder to reach now, buried under more of everything. But they are there.
I began this path partly because television gave me an image of medicine I wanted to be part of. The image didn’t hold up in every detail. It never could. But what was underneath it did.
The work is harder than “ER” made it look. It asks more than I understood it would. There are days when the distance between why I entered this profession and what the job actually requires feels very wide.
But what “The Pitt” has done, and what I am grateful for, is show that distance honestly, and show physicians crossing it anyway, every shift, for patients who may never know what it cost.
Watching it reminded me that while medicine has changed, the heart of it endures. The work is more demanding. The context more complex. The gratitude less visible. But the purpose is still there. Quieter, perhaps, but no less real.
Hospital Medicine is largely invisible work, done in strained institutions for frightened people, rarely noticed beyond the walls where it happens.
It matters. It has always mattered. And it means something, after the years we have had, to finally see a version of it on screen that comes close to the truth.
2026 National Hospitalist Day HM Voices Contest Winner
Dr. Choudry
Dr. Choudry is associate division chief of hospital medicine and an academic hospitalist at MedStar Washington Hospital Center and an assistant professor of medicine at Georgetown University School of Medicine, both in Washington, D.C.