‘Pitt’ Season 2 Finale Just Aired American Emergency C-Section TV Has Been Too Afraid To Show For Over 30 Years
I thought I would live my whole life without seeing the miracle of life until ‘The Pitt’ Season 1 Episode 11 premiered, with its realistic depiction of the birth of a female genitalia. Tonight’s Season 2 finale brought a similarly shocking emergency C-section for a woman named Judith who reluctantly enters the ER with severe preeclampsia.
Everything was clear. From the patient’s pubic hair as Robby cut, the retractors opened the woman’s abdomen before it filled with amniotic fluid, and a few gloved hands pulled the blue baby out of the fluid. The umbilical cord was milked, tied, and cut. Half of the team removed the placenta, while others worked on examining the newborn, with limbs peeling off and limping. Henderson prescribed medication to shrink the uterus, while Ellis said “massage a lot”.
McKay drilled a hole to give the newborn an “intraosseous line” of IO so they could deliver IV medications directly into his bone marrow. The team working on Judith packed her stomach with lap pads to stop the bleeding. After many units of blood, they finally found that the carotid pulse was weak, the baby finally cried, and the surgeon finally arrived and was brought up quickly.
The process itself isn’t what made this episode of ‘The Pitt’ special. It’s how they got into this particular type of C-section, “resuscitative hysterotomy” and pause to clarify the surrounding semantics.
It’s no longer called a “post-mortem C-section”, even if Judith had a heart attack. The new name clarifies the purpose, and stakes. They had four minutes to operate on the baby to give mother and baby a chance to survive.
A hysterotomy takes 36 seconds. The surgeon arrived twelve minutes after receiving the script. The chaos ends in an instant, and Robby can finally collapse, as subtly as needed.
The closest American TV has come before now
‘ER’ won five Emmys for Season 1 Episode 19, “Love’s Labor Lost” in which a pre-miscarriage patient undergoes an emergency C-section to crash after a failed delivery. Mom dies on the table, and it was called one of the most devastating hours of network television, but the show met the broadcast standards of its 1995 broadcast date.
At the time, Noah Wyle was still young enough to play a medical student. He filmed the episode while sick with mononucleosis, and hid IV bags in his pants pockets during filming to stay hydrated.
His character, John Carter, delivers two memorable lines; another funny response to a doctor’s inquiry, “Who is this?”: “I’m John Carter. I’m a med student and I compress the aorta.” One comes at the end of the episode, when he tells Dr. Mark Greene that he did “a heroic thing”. Fast forward 30 years later, and Dr. Wyle’s Robby is the one who takes part in the patients at the table. He doesn’t feel heroic, he’s traumatized.
In the ‘ER’ scene, cameras focused on faces (patients were stretched), sound design, and blood instead of anatomical replicas or step-by-step procedures. We still get separation between mother and child, Apgar scores, all the medical signs that are talked about, but the fear is emotional, not surgical, the way it was in ‘The Pitt’.
‘Grey’s Anatomy’ has featured three memorable C-sections (so far), including the Season 9 finale, when Meredith had an emergency C-section during a power outage, and two from Ben Warren in Season 12, one involving a kitchen knife and instructions from Arizona over the phone, and another in a hospital hallway.
These scenes have the Shondaland stamp of the TV show, the pressure of the situation raises the stakes, the conflict between the characters and the people gives us suspense, not just the horror of life’s dangers.
But in ‘The Pitt’ we see how close both mother and child are to death, how scary and violent and how fast the whole process is, how terrifying it is, so different from anything Judith has ever imagined for herself or her daughter. The reality of mother’s death is what we really saw demonstrated tonight in your complete surgical cleansing. It will stay with us for a long, long time.
