Like many of us in health care, I recently became engrossed in The Pitt. If you’re still watching—or plan to—consider this your spoiler alert. HBO’s new medical drama immerses viewers in a grueling 14-hour shift in the ER of a trauma center. I initially tuned in for Noah Wyle, my teenage crush, but I stayed for the catharsis. Never have I related on such a visceral level to the portrayal of health care workers.

In Dr. Robby, I saw reflections of the emergency medicine docs who trained me, not only in the way he dressed, hoodie and all, but in the way he pimped and encouraged his residents to pick up the pace. I related to the charge nurse the way I have related to, and bonded with, every charge nurse with whom I’ve been in the trenches. But more than anything, I related to the emotional toll the patients were taking on the physicians.

In one early episode, Dr. Robby steps out of a consultation room after telling a patient’s sister that her loved one has died. He pauses for a beat in the hallway, taps his fist on a banister, steeling himself before moving on to the next patient. I immediately texted a colleague. I’ve done that, I wrote. I’ve taken that beat.

Later in the season, Dr. Robby suffers a full-blown panic attack after being unable to save a young friend’s girlfriend. He emotionally recounts the list of patients who died that day and how he will never be able to forget them. And as he collapses into a sobbing heap on the floor, I felt unexpectedly validated. The masses were witnessing a form of my grief, my burnout.

I’ve been a pediatric oncologist for over a decade now, and because I’ve chosen to focus on neuro-oncology, loss is an all-too-familiar presence. I too have recounted patients. I too have had those heartbreaking stretches when I moved from one room to the next, delivering devastating news, kissing the forehead of a cold child, hearing the guttural cries of parents. I’ve had days that brought me to my knees.

But during my catharsis I realized how The Pitt felt worlds apart from the medical dramas I grew up with—shows where the doctors were brilliant, brusque, and often emotionally impermeable. I thought back to ER, to Drs. Benton and Ross—portrayed by Eric La Salle and George Clooney—locked in ego-fueled clashes. They saved lives with skill and swagger, rarely pausing long enough for emotion to catch up. At the time, I admired their competence, but as a budding physician, I vowed never to practice medicine with that kind of bravado.

Now, though, I find myself reconsidering—not because I want the ego, but because I wonder if it gave them, and their real-life counterparts, something I lack. Was that “god complex” a form of armor? Does such a complex—dismissed by many, myself included—offer a kind of insulation? Doctors who moved from loss to loss without apparent fragility. Perhaps not out of callousness, but because they believed: If I can’t save them, who could? There’s something enviable in that certainty, in that ability to go on. Perhaps I shouldn’t have been so quick to judge.

In the final episode, Dr. Robby heads to the hospital roof and finally lets go. He tells a colleague how much he’s carrying; how close he came to breaking. And instead of being told to toughen up or push through, he hears something simple and steady: “You rocked this shit today.” That moment resonated with me. I’ve had people say that to me, too—in different words, on different days. Are those moments our new form of armor? Not the invulnerability I once thought I needed, the arrogance I once recoiled from, but something better. Real validation. A kind of strength that doesn’t come from pretending to be a god, but from letting yourself be fully human, and still being told, you did enough. You can keep going.

Without the armor of invincibility, we need the kind forged in community. In shared grief. In honest conversations with colleagues who’ve also paused outside the room, also recounted patients. The kind of strength that doesn’t require us to pretend we are untouched by this work but rather allows us to stay human in a field that so often demands we become something more or less than that. Our survival comes not in ego, but in each other. In the texts after a patient loss. In the colleagues who notice when you’re unraveling. In the simple, unflashy moments when someone tells you: You rocked this shit today.

Lauren Weintraub is a pediatric oncologist.