Red Means Urgency

a poem about The Pitt & gun violence in America

Note: spoilers for Season 1 of The Pitt, which you have hopefully watched by now because it’s incredible. TW: gun violence, SA

I wrote this poem last year after watching The Pitt, S1 E12. For whatever reason, I watched the episode in the bath, so when I started crying my tears slipped down into too-hot bathwater. I cried almost the entire episode, the kind of slow steady tears that keep coming no matter how many times you try to wring them out. If you haven’t watched it and want me to spoil it for you, the episode kicks off the last arc of the season—the ER setting up to receive patients from a mass shooting at a music festival.

The tears kind of surprised me. I wasn’t crying for one character in particular, which is usually why I’m crying during a fictional TV show. I was crying because it didn’t feel fictional at all. It isn’t, really.

When the Columbine shooting happened, I was seven. I grew up in Colorado, so it was close to home. I was in elementary school and remember everyone wearing blue and white ribbons for weeks afterwards, but I didn’t really understand why. When I was fifteen, there was a shooting at a high school in the neighboring district—the gunman took seven girls hostage. He sexually assaulted them, and killed one of them. I went to her memorial. Her best friends band played “Zombie” by The Cranberries. That same year I took drivers ed classes on the weekends in an empty Columbine classroom. This past year, there was a shooting at another high school near mine. It never ends. It feels like it never will.

After I got out of the bath and finished the episode I didn’t know what else to do besides write a poem. That’s usually what I do when I don’t know what else to do. I don’t know what to do now, so I’m going to share the poem. It’s not the same thing as what’s happening with ICE in this country, but it’s also not much different: systems failing people, people failing people. People trying to save people, people trying to kill people.

---

The Pitt

This week I watched a fictional crew
of emergency room doctors 
prepare for war
I mean a mass casualty incident
an MCI, a mass shooting 
The reddit boards say the writing was
inspired by the Las Vegas shooting—
yes, that one
I watch the doctors set up different zones
Color coded patient statuses 
Black and White means DOA, means
sometimes, close enough to dead to 
give up on 
Pink means superficial wound, alert
talking, walking, alive
Yellow means without care will die
within an hour
Red means almost dead, means 
immediate care, but anyone
can become a red, all it takes is one
wrong thing, or time, or both
Red means a lot of things, like stop, 
pain, hurt, hot, no, off, off, off
Red means urgency, means NEEDS 
ASSISTANCE, means will die without
a doctors hands on you — real, not 
fiction
They’re doing their best (the fictional
doctors) say the real doctors on the reddit
thread, they say this is pretty close 
to accurate, they say this captures the 
experience of limiting one bag of blood
a patient because resources are scarce 
Especially blood, and time, and 
doctors 
While the on-screen doctors work, 
I pull up a flow chart published 
on the Mayo Clinic website for how to 
triage patients during a real MCI
Green means minimal, 
Yellow delayed, Red immediate  
Black means dead, Grey means
expected dead
Grey is a new status
Grey means, it’s okay to stop, means
there’s nothing else we can do, we 
already know what’s going to happen
Despite our best efforts, despite time
and blood

---

Note on the image:

This is a random find from my archive. I took it in 2013, on a road in Colorado driving back to my then-boyfriends house at night. I wasn’t trying to do a slow image blurry thing, so at the time it was a throwaway image. Because I never delete anything, I found it going back through files years later, and I’ve had it bookmarked for something ever since. I love the stretched out STOP, the streak of red, the text that isn’t text anymore. It felt fitting for the post. After all, in addition to pain and blood and urgency, red means stop.

Xo,
B