The Moment She Turned Off the Lights
What a hospital drama gets right about real empathy
"We do not rise to the level of our ideals, we sink to the mercy of our routines."
—Archilochus, or some exhausted medic misquoting him under hospital fluorescents
When the Lights Go Quiet
I’ve just finished watching The Pitt, which, if you haven’t seen it, is that hospital drama that gets a lot right about what healthcare workers go through.
There’s a moment in The Pitt that doesn’t shout, doesn’t climax, or even get a dramatic score. But it sticks.
An autistic man is brought into the ER—nonverbal, distressed, recoiling from every light, every sound, every rushed question that the trauma team throws at him. The fluorescent lights, the beeping monitors, the overlapping voices; it's a sensory assault, and no one seems to notice that the man isn’t responding because of that environment.
Except Dr. King.
Taylor Dearden plays her with this calm, near-meditative presence that makes you lean in. In this scene, she doesn’t monologue, doesn’t “solve” the patient. She just quietly walks to the wall and turns off the overhead lights.
The room hushes. Monitors still blink. The patient still breathes. But suddenly, the whole space becomes human again.
It’s such a simple act. So small you could miss it. But it changes the tone, not just of the scene, but of the show’s idea of care. It’s not about drama. It’s about noticing. About knowing when to step in and when to step back. About how empathy can be clinical without being cold.
That moment, no dialogue, just the click of a switch, is the kind of medicine The Pitt quietly gets right. In that dimmed room, Taylor Dearden shows why Dr. King isn’t just the smartest person in the ER; she’s the kindest.
Compressions and Bumper Stickers
Watching The Pitt brought it all back—those early COVID days in the ED, when the air felt close to breaking. Everyone had red marks on their cheeks from the N95s, and some of us carried spare scrubs in paper bags, convinced we might have to sleep in the hospital overnight. I hadn’t done chest compressions before then. That changed quickly.
My first time doing them was beside a man whose car I had parked next to all year without speaking. His big, declarative bumper stickers had made it easy to dislike him in theory. But none of that mattered when the code was called. The woman was crashing. We both ran. I don’t even remember who started compressions, if it was him or me. We just did them. Together.
She lived.
We ended up as work friends—the kind who decompress between patients, laugh at the same dark jokes, and know better than to bring up bumper stickers.
I think about that a lot.
How easily everything falls away when someone’s care is on the line. Politics, backstories, and all the things you tell yourself matter are gone. You fall into rhythm with whoever’s there, whoever has clean hands and steady breath and knows where the suction is.
Lights, Language, and the Shape of Mercy
It started with a crisis and almost ended in tragedy. Walker—a 33-year-old man with autism—had arrived at Loyola University Medical Center in full sensory meltdown, unable to speak, unable to cope. Security moved in, ready to restrain him. His mother, Ellen, said later all she could think was, “This will not end well—they’re gonna kill him.”
But then something unexpected happened: a public safety officer named Keith Miller didn’t follow the usual script. He didn’t escalate, didn’t restrain. He got low to the ground. He narrated Walker’s movements like a children’s game: “Walker sits down … Walker scoots back … Walker lies down.” He turned an emergency into a story Walker could follow.
The tension unraveled within moments. Walker began giving high-fives. Miller sang a song from Mister Rogers’ Neighborhood. Walker joined in, smiling. Ellen watched it happen: a room that had felt like a battlefield transformed into, in her words, “a party people wanted to join.”
Later, Ellen told Officer Miller, “Nobody else does what you do.” But Miller just said he understood—his son is autistic, and he recognized the fear in both Walker and his mother. “If we can’t do it by ourselves, there’s other people out there to help. I want to be one of those other people,” he said.
Threads Between Us
In a world that increasingly behaves like it’s trying to break itself into smaller and smaller factions, where difference is marketed as danger and common ground feels like a quaint artifact from a less monetized time, there are still places where people cooperate by human necessity.
The shared purpose found in emergencies doesn’t pretend to solve everything. It doesn’t reconcile history or rewrite policy. But it does something quieter: it forces people into proximity and asks them to act anyway. Over time, that acting anyway becomes a habit. Then it becomes memory. Then it becomes the beginning of a different kind of understanding.
In those moments, diversity is no longer a slogan or a seminar but becomes what it always was: a strength. People bring what they know, what they’ve seen, and what they’ve survived. They carry different maps and walk the same hallway. Somehow, it works.
Every time someone saves a life next to someone they don’t fully understand, something else gets mended in the background; a thread gets tied between “us” and “them.” And if enough of those threads hold, maybe the walls don’t need to.
Code Blue Bipartisanship
We shouldn't hate someone for what they believe, but should love them despite it. That’s easy to say in a coffee shop or a comments section, but harder in the trauma bay when the man next to you muttered something about “those people” not pulling themselves up. And yet, something unspoken happens when the overhead calls code blue, and both your hands are on the same chest, pushing in sync with the metronome that doesn’t care who you voted for. Not forgiveness. Not erasure. But recognition. That beneath the bumper stickers and bruised rhetoric, there’s still breath and bone and some trembling hope that maybe we’re more than our worst ideas; we’re just trying to keep each other alive in the only ways we know how.
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Writing some good stuff here, Aaron! There’s a lot of truth in your words and I’m sure it will strike a chord with other readers.
In a world hellbent on division, these threads of connection are lifelines. Keep tying them, thank you for sharing