I’m glad so many people have discovered Judith “Judy” Heumann through this silly little gif set. I am sorry to say she has died at the age of 75. She was known as the mother of disability rights. In 1970 she sued the Board of Education to become a licensed teacher and she won. In 1977 she was one of the organizers of the 504 Sit-in, a 24 day protest for disability rights. You can learn more about her story from her book Being Heumann, the picture book Fighting for YES! or the documentary Crip Camp.
Judy Heumann believed in the inherent value of each disabled individual and would never back down on what she thought was right. Her friends and fellow activists remember her as a strong leader.
people saying shawn hatosy should stop bringing up samira and mohabbot in interviews
mate if the writers told me in season 1 they were interested in exploring an extremely slow burn, complicated, forbidden workplace romance with me and a super compelling, compatible character, followed up with a shirtless scene in season 2 where the only sexy part is me seeing her compassion and quietly offering to help her patient ... only to then rip the other character from the show without notice or explanation at the end of season 2, i would literally never shut up about it i would be so fucking insufferable. shawn should keep bringing it up forever
i can't help but recognise how explicitly gendered the difference in the shows treatment of robby and samira are-and of course subsequently how the discourse surrounding the both of them is so starkly different when the average watcher comments on them.
tw: suicidal ideation, mental health crises, personal experiences with suicide attempts
over the entirety of season 2, we see robby's decline in his mental health. and how do we see it being portrayed? mainly as lashing out at the people around him-whether that be towards his surrogate maternal figure in dana, or his surrogate son in langdon. he's sad, but a LOT of that sadness is expressed in the form of anger. it bleeds into his handling of patients as well, with him yelling at the boss of the necrotising fasciitis case, loudly cursing in the middle of the ed, and with the emts who applied the ekg leads incorrectly. we're told this is the culmination of pressure that has been building since adamsons death, and has been compounded by every subsequent loss robby has faced in the ER. there's pretty solid evidence from real life studies to suggest that men, on average, tend to favour more violent means of ending things, which may be to align better with traditional masculine gender roles. and i mean- going off on a motorcycle spirit quest? i'd be hard-pressed to find something that encapsulates being a man in today's society more.
samira has a panic attack that is so severe, she assumes it's an MI. we've been told that this job is all she has in season 1-she gets pretty defensive when mckay tells her that she can't only live to work, and talks about how socialising is something she views as only possible after her residency is complete. at the start of season 2, her plans for her job fall through. she then has an uninsured man suffering from dka walk out on AMA, despite her doing everything she possibly can to get him the treatment she needs. her job, the only thing in her life that she seems to value and prioritise, has failed her. what's interesting is the way she behaves after the panic attack. samira withdraws into herself. the doubt she has in her own abilities as a doctor, are once again brought into question when her kidney stones patient develops an AAA. and the cycle of doubt and withdrawing snowballs especially after orlando returns to the ER, having almost died at his second job. at no point does she really reach out to anyone, and her method of dealing with her ongoing mental health episode, is to internalize everything. this too aligns with traditional feminine roles, where suffering in silence, and enduring everything, are traits not just assigned to, but even sometimes greatly valued in women.
now to address the fandom response to both these crises. robby, to the casual viewer, has remained generally sympathetic to the audience. his outbursts are treated as the symptoms of his worsening mental health in a vacuum. there is this general viewpoint held by so many viewers this season, that he's almost exempt from responsibility, because of his suicidal ideation. he's clearly not able to adequately manage this ED, but it's not treated as something that is at the end of the day, his responsibility. he's dismissive towards the med students, passes extremely inappropriate comments about a comatose patient where his family could have overheard him, weaponises roxy's death against mckay, undercuts langdon, he's unsympathetic towards the malnourished inmate, and consistently undermines and dismisses al-hashimi, who in her own right is an accomplished senior attending who worked in an active warzone (and this is MUCH before he sees any symptoms of her seizure disorder). but he's somehow still seen as a good doctor by the audience, despite him failing at so many aspects of his job. and to top it all off, he openly shouts at, and derides samira after her panic attack. it's a stark contrast to how he handled his disappointment last season- with langdon getting called out in private, and him actively suppressing any possibility of people talking about the situation.
meanwhile we know samira lost her father when she was young, she's been called a great doctor by so many of her patients, abbot, collins, and even robby (albeit while she wasn't privy to the praise), but a lot of the audience seems to see her mental health crisis as proof that she doesn't have what it takes to work in the ER. her failings this season, are not seen as a manifestation of her worsening mental health, but seem to reflect badly on not just her abilities as a doctor, but on her character as a person. she's ungrateful because she doesn't pick up her mother's phone calls, she's incompetent because she missed the AAA, and she doesn't belong in the ed because because she can't keep her feelings out of her work.
now i know it's nothing groundbreaking to see and call out the extremely obvious examples of misogyny in the fandoms response to these 2 characters-who by all intents and purposes- are actually pretty similar when it comes to their relationship to their job. but it's interesting how the writers seem to have unconsciously fallen into pretty gendered forms of expression for each of their characters going through a mental health episode. it's also pretty concerning to hear how noah wyle himself reads robby's treatment of samira, as actually just being tough love, something that in-universe al-hashimi calls out, but somehow the actor still believes it is.
it breaks my heart how much of an interesting story this could have been, if it wasn't obvious by this point that the writers have fallen ass backwards into this plot, and it doesn't seem like they were ever interested in engaging with the dichotomy of robby and samira over season 2. this was only made clearer to me, after having gotten the last proper conversation between robby and samira that takes place in the finale, spoiled to me.
the writers and the audience of the pitt seem to have made their stance extremely clear. that there is a correct way to have a breakdown, and a wrong way. one gets you people to check in with you, and reassure you that you are still needed, and the other gets you kicked out of the emergency department and out of the show. that only a certain kind of person is afforded sympathy and reassurance, no matter how actively harmful they may be to the people around them. it really wouldn't surprise me if in season 3, they drop some throwaway line about samira actually quitting emergency medicine (during her fucking r4), and switching to psychiatry, and im going to roll my eyes and move on with my life.
to qualify everything (because some of y'all can't be normal about people criticizing this show), I'm currently doing my junior residency in surgery, and have attempted suicide twice over the course of my med school years. i unfortunately have people in my life who didn't fail at their attempts, and their lives and deaths will forever be a part of me. as such, I know that even as someone who is actively suicidal, you can still cause harm, that you are in fact, responsible for, and it looks like the writers are more than happy to avoid any of that responsibility for robby next season, by not even including one of the characters that he, as the mentor and superior in the situation, has harmed. this season of the pitt could have been such an important piece of media, because a lot of the time, especially with women, the signs of an impending mental health crisis are not loud, and oftentimes, the contributing factors are brushed under the carpet and never fully resolved. i'm beyond upset about the news regarding supriya ganesh's departure, and a significant part of that is because we're never going to get any semblance of proper accountability from robby, or any sort of intervention for samira.
edit: wrote senior resident instead of senior attending when referring to al hashimi on accident
The slash trach scene was so critical for establishing not only who Al Hashimi is but how unreliable Robby is at this moment in time.
It shows that Baran, for all her interest in efficiency and methodology is what we know the be a crucial part of being an ER attending. She's a cowboy. It was her "Fuck the standard of care. If we want to save him, we go in now," moment. It wasn't her asking for forgiveness instead of permission because she asked for neither. She did what she had to do to give the patient a shot at living even though she'd never done it before and told Garcia (very politely) to go fuck herself after she finished.
It's almost exactly the Abbot/Walsh interaction from the first season with Al Hashimi playing the roles of both Abbot and Mohan and that moment in season 1 was one of the most gratifying medical moments of the show because it really showed us as an audience exactly who Abbot was. He's a combat zone physician and a teacher in his bones who is willing to do whatever it take to teach his students and save lives even it it's scary or unconventional. He knew the research and he took the risk. That's literally exactly what Al-Hashimi did.
Up until this point, we've been skeptical of Al Hashimi because Robby is skeptical of Al Hashimi and he's largely the view point of the show. But after 2x10, it's very clear that nothing Robby is thinking or doing can be understood as reasonable. He's simply not grounded in reality anymore.
Everyone around her besides Robby sees Al Hashimi as smart and competent. Dennis, Langdon, Dana, Samira. But especially Jack. Ten minutes into knowing her, he asserts both "she seems cool" and "I like her" and I think it's because he immediately recognizes in her the things he's seen oversees.
She knows combat zone medicine. She understands taking the risk when there are no other options. She understands what it's like to have very limited choices and make the hard decisions. She stands up for her people. We see her immediately confront Robby about his behavior towards Samira. She is first and foremost there to teach. She's tough and fair.
She is all the things we admire in Abbot and want from Robby that he is simply not able to be at present. And Robby can't see it because he's just not of right mind.
and another thing… i think it’s hilarious how abbot very obviously supports and respects and even encourages the women in the ER and was married and is a widower and robby has had failed relationship after relationship after situationship and had a woman literally terminate her pregnancy because of him and like none of this has caused robby to have any self reflection abt how his ego controls every interaction he has with the women that are supposed to look to him for anything
mohabbot nation we are so back. if you're in line for a mohabbot burger STAY IN LINE. mohabbot nation how we feeling. just did 500 lines of mohabbot cocaine. i went to mohabbot nation and they were all partying. mohabbot. mohabbot mohabbot mohabbot. next week's episode is going to hit harder than the bullet that necked charlie kirk
