Thinking about Javadi deciding to go into psychiatry. In season two she actually proves not particularly adept at patient or family communication with the Davis family. She has one decent moment with the sister but she also has a moment where she makes her cry and Princess has to deal with the fall out. I don’t have a sense of if she genuinely likes psych or if it’s just an out from competition and expectations. It doesn’t seem like she’s done a psych rotation since her clerkships and that’s very minimal experience to have to get a sense of the field.
No shame to anyone choosing a lifestyle speciality in any way, but I do sort of have the sense she’s choosing psych in part because it’s an easier residency (objectively true- the hours are relatively very good) and a less competitive one (as is EM actually, whereas derm which her dad points her to is very competitive and something she likely would do for the prestige, money, and lifestyle).
I think psych is great if you genuinely love it and want to do it. But I feel like part of her choice is about realizing that actually she might not even want to do medicine at all (she says as much at the end of both seasons) and as a kind of fuck you to her parents (because she chose one of the least prestigious specialities, again no shade as someone who also chose a very not prestigious speciality).
She feels so young in this choice. Like she isn’t making decisions about what she wants but is rebelling against her parents and their expectations. I wonder if a future Javadi will actually work as a psychiatrist or if she’ll turn into a full time influencer or start a wellness company.
Whoever left me the prompt to write Baran and Robby getting married, I love you but do you have any idea how much research I am about to have to do into Persian wedding traditions? Unless they somehow end up in Vegas for a medical conference and get married on a whim. Hmm, much to think about there. Married by Elvis in Vegas? Now I’m imagining them in some The Hangover type hijinks.
- Baran experiencing her first big seizure in years (whether it is a tonic-clonic or a cluster of focal impaired ones is up to you)
- Baran struggling with the fact that she cannot do something independently and safely and hating the fact that she is having to ask for help
I posted this one to ao3 as a one shot but there's a real chance that I'll post a second chapter later.
Thanks for the prompt!
Not Alone (564 words) by Rae325
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Pitt (TV)
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Baran Al-Hashimi/Michael "Robby" Robinavitch
Characters: Baran Al-Hashimi, Michael "Robby" Robinavitch
Additional Tags: Epilepsy, Hurt/Comfort
Summary:
Baran is with Robby when she has a seizure.
omigosh omigosh omigosh i would die if you did anything barantos related!!! maybe trinity helping manage baran's seizures (or her fear about having more seizures), or baran coaching trinity through her own fear of baran's illness? thank you !! xx
I hope this is close enough to what you wanted. It's not Trinity helping Baran during a seizure, more helping her try to find peace with her body. And sometimes that peace comes through sex. If this turned out to be a fic that was totally different from what you wanted please feel free to yell at me and I will happily write another iteration of your prompt.
Pleasure (3014 words) by Rae325
Chapters: 1/1
Fandom: The Pitt (TV)
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Baran Al-Hashimi/Trinity Santos
Characters: Baran Al-Hashimi, Trinity Santos
Additional Tags: Smut, Romance, Shame, Allusions to past sexual trauma, Tumblr Prompt, Prompt Fic, POV Baran Al-Hashimi, five years after season two, Baran is still coming to terms with the way her life has changed
Summary:
Baran runs into her former resident at a medical conference and decides to take Trinity up on the suggestion of spending the night together.
Baran and her son going through a school shooting drill/being scared
What if I misread this the first time and wrote an actual school shooting instead? So sorry!
Trigger warning for school shooting and war.
Thank you all for the prompts. You are making my train journey far more enjoyable, though I confess I’m ignoring the work I’m supposed to be doing in favor of fanfic. It will definitely take me a while to write all the prompts but I’m very exited. Some I’ll post on ao3 too and some of the shorter ones will probably just live here.
It happens on field day. Baran is on the sidelines cheering for her son as he hops along in a potato sack. Babak is not a sporty kid but he’s having a good time and that is what matters. He’s nearly in last place when he gets to the finish line, and that’s what saves him.
Baran startles at the noise and feels foolish for it. Her body has never stopped believing that most loud noises are gunshots. It’s better than when she first returned from Afghanistan, but still fireworks, construction, cars backfiring, all make her heart race and her breaths come too quickly, make her need to consciously settle her body and remind herself she isn’t in the maternity hospital. That’s what Baran is trying to do when she sees the first child fall. Then the second. Then the third. Sees blood spread out on the grass.
Baran runs towards Babak and throws her body on top of his. She’d spent an hour in Kabul shielding another woman’s child with her body, that woman lying beside Baran, eyes staring emptily. It was only when the attack was over and a soldier had come and helped Baran up that she had realized the child was already dead.
“It’s ok, you’re ok,” she whispers to Babak. The gunfire continues. She could help people, save people. But all that she can think about now is her son, his small body pressed beneath hers. “I love you,” she tells him, needs it to be the last words he hears if they die.
***
The shootings never get easier. Tree of Life. Pittfest. Days that Dana can never forget. Today an elementary school. The first ambulances are rolling up now, and Dana takes a deep breath, but there is no way to prepare herself for what she knows is coming. They’re expecting twenty victims, and the sight of the six-year-old in the first ambulance makes Dana want to vomit. She’s so small, looks so much like Dana’s eldest when she was that age. Mohan rolls the child inside and Dana goes to the next ambulance, shocked when she sees a familiar face leaning over the stretcher. Baran Al-Hashimi is covered in blood, her hair and the back of her shirt caked in it, and Dana can’t tell if it’s hers or someone else’s. The blood on her arm is hers though, a gunshot wound obvious in her forearm though she shows no signs of acknowledging her own injury. Instead, she’s soothing her child, her tiny five-year-old boy that Dana has never met before but has seen endless photos of. Baran is whispering to him quietly while he cries, and Dana sees the wound on the boy’s upper arm.
Cary Nguyen gets out. “Five-year-old with a GSW to the arm. Good pulses. Received four of morphine. Tachycardic but otherwise normal vitals. Mom won’t let us examine her properly or give her anything, but it looks like the bullet that hit the kid went through her arm and another grazed her back.”
“Baran,” Dana says gently as she watches Baran get out of the ambulance like nothing happened to her, won’t let go of her son. “Can we take care of you?”
“I need to be with Babak.” Baran looks at Dana, utter terror on her face. Dana’s kids are older but she’d spent nights lying awake after listening to the news about yet another school shooting worrying about sending her kids to school the next day.
“Of course,” Dana says, wrapping her arm around Baran’s arm as they walk. Dana knows not to suggest a wheelchair, knows Baran won’t leave her boy’s side. “He’s going to be ok. You both are.”
“Shen,” Dana yells, “Meet me in trauma one. I’ve got two GSWs.”
They transfer Baran’s boy on to the bed, and still she manages not to ever stop touching him. She’s singing to him softly now while he cries, trying to calm him as they get him hooked up to the monitors and evaluate him. Dana brings Baran a chair and eases her into it. “I’m going to look at your back,” Dana says, needs to see what’s under Baran’s shirt to decide how urgently they need to attend to her wounds. Baran nods. “Princess is going to take your vitals and I’m going to cut your shirt off.” She nods again, seemingly unconcerned with what they do as long as she can stay with her child.
The bullet seems to have grazed Baran’s back, but she’s still bleeding. “Shen, come here,” Dana tells him.
“Baran,” he says as he puts his hand on her wrist to to feel for a pulse, “can you move your fingers?” Dana is relieved when Baran does. “Can we give you something for pain?”
“Low dose. I need to stay alert for Babak,” Baran answers, and Dana isn’t sure how Baran isn’t screaming in pain right now.
“Perlah can you get an IV?” Shen asks before turning his attention back to Baran, “Babak is stable. Superficial gunshot wound to his right upper arm. No other injuries that we can see.”
“I don’t think he has any other injuries. I was on top of him.”
“Mom,” Babak calls when Santos examines his arm, tears coming again with the pain.
“I’m here,” Baran promises. “I’m not going anywhere. You’re ok.”
“You probably do need to go to the OR,” Shen tells Baran. “Who can we call for your son?”
“I’m not leaving until my ex gets here.I can’t leave Babak alone.”
“I understand,” Dana says seriously. She would do the same in Baran’s situation. “We’ve got you both now.”
Just realized in season one of the Pitt they’re only staffing one night shift attending. Abbott is leaving when Robby arrives. He comes in because of pittfest. Then Shen arrives for night shift. And he tells Abbot to go home assuming he was day shift and abbot says actually he’s supposed to be off. So it does seem like they typically staff one attending and July 4th evening is an outlier. Maybe a time for extra traumas?
Continuing on my season one Pitt rewatch. I love Shen. I want a season with Shen and Al-Hashimi as the attendings. I can’t help it. I like Robby and Abbot but I have favorites. Shen and Al-Hashimi aren’t overly dramatic. They’re not having mental health crises. He’s on his fifth Dunkin. She’s suggesting he switch to loose leaf tea with her. I just think they could have a nice calm shift together without drama.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
New chapter is up. Baran gets the flu, because sometimes it’s important to torture your characters with viral illnesses and traumatic childhood memories
I ask again, is Ellis a resident? I’m genuinely unsure. I rewatched a little bit of 2x13 for fic research and there are two things going against her being a resident. First, abbot asks Shen who their senior is that night and he answers Henderson. Not Henderson and Ellis. Just Henderson. Then Ellis is pimping Mohan constantly (pimping being the term we use for asking residents or students pretty aggressive questions. The Socratic method but meaner if you will. And yes that really is the term used to describe it). It just doesn’t make sense for Ellis to talk to Mohan this way if they’re in the same year. Maybe Ellis is a fellow. If so I wonder what fellowship she’s doing. Maybe we’ll learn next season.
Got two notes that she’s a fellow. So if she’s a teaching fellow that’s basically a year of doing some research, some educational stuff, and some time working as an attending. When she’s working a shift in the ED she’s an attending (unless she were doing a different type of fellowship). This is hilarious to me since apparently the night shift is being staffed by three attendings. Meanwhile day shift is fighting about whether they can staff two attendings for what we are led to believe is a high volume major trauma center. Sure hope a major plot line for season three is someone working on this hospitals scheduling decisions.
I ask again, is Ellis a resident? I’m genuinely unsure. I rewatched a little bit of 2x13 for fic research and there are two things going against her being a resident. First, abbot asks Shen who their senior is that night and he answers Henderson. Not Henderson and Ellis. Just Henderson. Then Ellis is pimping Mohan constantly (pimping being the term we use for asking residents or students pretty aggressive questions. The Socratic method but meaner if you will. And yes that really is the term used to describe it). It just doesn’t make sense for Ellis to talk to Mohan this way if they’re in the same year. Maybe Ellis is a fellow. If so I wonder what fellowship she’s doing. Maybe we’ll learn next season.
Listened to another Sepideh Moafi interview, and I take actors’ backstories for their characters with a grain of salt until they’re confirmed on screen (though it’s interesting the extent to which this show seems to incorporate actors’ head canons since she mentioned that when Noah Wyle was working on writing 2x14 he asked what her backstory was for her character’s war related trauma). But she talked about how Al-Hashimi was the source of her family’s pain and shame her whole life, and I think if that’s the case it shifts a bit how I think about her character.
The idea that her family was actually overtly ashamed of having a child with epilepsy is so heartbreaking. It’s different to me than a character who is ashamed because of the more subtle messages she got from her family and society about what she could and couldn’t accomplish. Subtle things that lead to internalized shame like her father always looking for cures or her mother being overbearing or being treated as less intelligent or less capable at home or at school, all lead to lots of people with disabilities internalizing shame and ableist ideas. That’s more subtle subconscious shame she might get from her family that still to me can coexist in a complicated way with being deeply loved and embraced by her family.
But the idea that her family was actively ashamed of her and that she was treated as a secret is a much different upbringing. It’s not the subtle messages and microaggressions. A family being ashamed of having a disabled child is just a bigger more overt experience of discrimination and marginalization within the family.
And yeah it fits with the idea that Baran didn’t even tell her husband. And it fits with the notion that when he would have eventually found out because I don’t think she could have hid it once she had a seizure and she stopped driving and had to deal with work consequences, that she would have been so emotionally closed off that it ended the relationship.
Having parents be ashamed of a person is such a fundamental lack of safety in a foundational relationship. And maybe there was a split. Maybe the shame came from her father and the pain from her mother. So at least there was one loving parent, but there is a betrayal of the loving parent never intervening with the other parent.
I fear that ultimately this character might be canonically straight, but I enjoy queer characters so I’m happy to ponder her experience if she is queer. And I find it hard to believe that parents who are outwardly, overtly ashamed of having a child with a disability would be totally accepting of a child who is queer. Which makes me even more attached to late in life lesbian Baran who only figured it out when she was married to a man.
Anyway just putting my extra angsty, psychologically fucked up Baran thoughts out into the world.
RE: Your Mohan Post, I saw someone's tags on a gifset and I was like wait wait, here's another thing:
Speed is incredibly important in an ED. We can talk about how doctors and nurses are forced to work more than able because of hiring practices and take on more-but I do think there is a point to be made by how Mohan's speed does affect others.
Like yeah, she takes her time and ultimately makes good connections with patients (which is why she has high satisfaction scores) but I wonder: if she was forced to move at the speed of her fellow residents, would her scores still be as good? I think the scripts and other characters reactions (such as Collins referring to her as slow-mo in the show, and Langdon doing so as well in a scene that was either filmed and deleted or simply just written) is that it also bothers them.
Like we see Langdon, who is only a year ahead of her, treat a lot more patients in season 1. And I think (even though part of its due to being in triage) when he comes back to the main hub he still is able to treat more, see more patients and be involved in more cases, even just for a few minutes. I think even McKay saw just as much if not a few more cases, or was involved in more.
To me I wonder: does she get too caught up in cases such as Orlando's often? I wish she was in season 3 to see more of this dynamic, but I also think her story ultimately ending with her not being a good fit for ED wouldn't have gone over well, despite the fact the show kinda says so.
Efficiency is really important. One of the most important skills in working in the US healthcare system at this moment is balancing the ability to connect with patients with the ability to see the number of patients needed.
I’ll just share what my experience is because I think it’s a good window into pace of practice that people not in healthcare might not know or understand. My training is in internal medicine and I work in primary care and urgent care at a community health center that takes care of mainly low income patients, the majority of whom are immigrants who do not speak English.
In primary care almost all my patients are elderly, extremely medically and socially complex and require an interpreter. Their visits are 15 minutes long. Think about that. 15 minutes for an 80 year old patient who has numerous health conditions, takes 20 medications, needs an interpreter for the visit, is marginally housed, and is afraid of being deported. That’s a typical visit for me. And I do that again and again, seeing 25 patients per day
I can’t run behind or my patients would wait hours and become angry and I would never go home. On top of that are administrative tasks for my panel of 1500 patients. You have to be efficient. You literally cannot do that job if you’re not committed to learning to be efficient. I have a wonderful friend who is so kind and thorough and she gets paid for 40 hours per week and literally works 80 hours because she spends time outside of work doing administrative tasks. This is unsustainable. This is why inefficiency contributes to burn out.
Now I don’t work in an ED but I do work in an urgent care. One shift I work with the kindest most empathetic doctor. She has Mohan energy with patients. They adore this doctor. And when we work together, in a four hour shift she might see ten patients while I see twenty. Now my coworker is kind and wonderful and doesn’t have Mohan’s attitude towards her colleagues so I don’t mind. But you can see how one doctor’s inefficiency makes a lot more work for the other doctor. It also means I just can’t take time with my patients. I have to have quick visits. I can’t take the extra few minutes to sit with a crying patient. Because in the waiting room people are cursing and threatening our front desk staff. And patients are coming out of their rooms and yelling at nurses about the wait time.
It would be wonderful if the system was built for doctors to spend hours with patients, but that’s not reality. Occasionally it has to happen with a special circumstance. But it can’t be the norm or the system falls apart and everyone suffers.
Geriatrics is a good speciality for slower doctors because you have longer visits and more support staff. But Samira would have to go into EM Geri which is different. She would still work in the ED. Otherwise she would need to redo her whole residency in IM or FM then do a geriatrics fellowship. And as someone who found residency to be some of the most challenging years of my life I cannot imagine choosing to do a second one.
Just figured I’d give some context since a lot of my thoughts on Mohan are shaped by having worked with very slow residents and interns both in the hospital when I was a resident and now when I supervise them. They cause real problems for teammates and patients. And residents are learning and so if they’re working on efficiency that’s great. But Mohan’s self-righteous attitude where she refuses to try to work on this is what gets me.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
This update brought to you by @tedwinisconfused posting the most beautifully written but unforgivable angst yesterday. I had to go write fluff to cope.
An Archive of Our Own, a project of the Organization for Transformative Works
Chapters: 14/?
Fandom: The Pitt (TV)
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Relationships: Baran Al-Hashimi/Michael "Robby" Robinavitch
Characters: Baran Al-Hashimi, Michael "Robby" Robinavitch
Additional Tags: Hurt/Comfort, Angst, Chronic Illness, Depression, Epilepsy
Summary:
Baran Al-Hashimi and Michael Robinavitch are at turning points in their lives, coping with chronic illnesses and finding new ways forward. After Robby returns from his sabbatical, they find themselves drawn to each other.
