Noah Wyle says his nurse mom had a ‘PTSD reaction’ to ‘The Pitt’

It’s not just you. Noah Wyle‘s own mom has found watching his Max series The Pitt to be intense.

“My mother was an orthopedic nurse and an operating room nurse. She worked for 20 years at a hospital in Hollywood,” Wyle said on Monday’s episode of NPR’s Fresh Air . “And she came over for breakfast last Sunday. And she came into the kitchen, and within five seconds of being there, she said, ‘You know, Noah, I can’t stop thinking about last week’s episode and that scene where you were listing all the people who died.'”

“‘I had my own PTSD reaction,'” Wyle said his mother, Marjorie, told him. “‘I suddenly remembered everybody. I remembered the 4-year-old. I remembered the pregnant woman with the baby. I remembered the gang member that I tried to keep alive by squeezing two units of blood.’ And she’s just listing these names. And she’s, you know, getting teary-eyed, and she finishes.”

In the scene that she mentioned, Wyle’s Dr. Michael “Robby” Robinavitch was on the verge of a breakdown during his shift at Pittsburgh Trauma Medical Hospital. The girlfriend of his unofficial stepson Jake had died, even after he tried everything he could think of to save her. And when the stepson blamed him, Dr. Robby listed all the other people who had died in his care that day. The man to whom everyone else had turned for answers then went off into a quiet part of the hospital and had a breakdown.

In Wyle’s conversation with his mother, he asked why she hadn’t shared her pain with him.

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“I said, ‘My goodness, Mom, I was on a medical show for 15 years. You never told me that.’ And she says, ‘Well, that wasn’t real,’ and I said, ‘Well, this one wasn’t either.’ And she said, ‘But it felt real,’ and it brought all that up for me. Isn’t that funny?’ And so here I am in my own kitchen having this lovely, sort of cathartic and catalytic moment with my mother. And I asked her, I said, ‘The 4-year-old, when was that?’ She said, ‘Oh, I think your brother was probably about 4 at the time. I think that’s why it hit me.’ And then I thought to myself, ‘Oh, so you came home and you made us dinner that night, and you helped us with our homework? Wow.'”

From 1994 to 2009, Wyle played Dr. John Carter on NBC’s hit medical drama ER. In his new project for Max, he’s the star but also a writer and executive producer.