Slowly, though, the Alzheimer's which the viewing audience could see coming all the way from the Rocky Mountains begins to overtake Hawkeye. He can't remember which residents go with which patients go with which traumas; he gets testy when the residents prompt him for information or explanations; he barges into Art Boy's room by mistake, and Art Boy informs him sullenly, "All I did was puke." "You weren't in the explosion?" a befuddled Hawkeye asks, and Art Boy says no, and wants to know what happened: "It sounds pretty crazy out there." Hawkeye absently says, "Yeah," and looks out at the turmoil through the blinds of Art Boy's room, then forces himself back out into the thick of things. An anvil marked "Disorientation Symbolism" smashes through my ceiling just then, so I can't say for sure, but I believe that the slo-mo kicks in and the sound becomes rather faraway and echoey, and I believe also that Hawkeye stands in the hallway and desperately tries to get his bearings while looking fearful and watching other ER personnel doing their jobs quickly and without hesitation, and he doesn't snap out of it until Chuny yells, "Coming through!" and bumps him out of the way with a crash cart or something, and I extricate myself from beneath the anvil, scribble, "We get it, thanks," on a piece of paper, roll up the piece of paper, attach it to the leg of a small passenger pigeon, and release the pigeon from my window. Because we get it.

Hawkeye next plunges into a trauma room where Kerry "could use an extra pair of hands" to deal with a pulmonary edema, and he prepares to do a procedure; Lucy pesters him about another patient, and he tells her to "do an echo," and when she continues to question him, he snaps, "Just -- just do the damn echo!" Kerry gives him a look. Lily hands him an equipment tray, and he wants to know "what the hell" it is, and Kerry explains that it's a percutaneous lavage kit and advises him on which technique to use with it. Hawkeye apparently can't remember the Seldinger technique that Kerry mentioned, and he balks: "No. I wanna do an open lavage." Lily and Kerry look surprised, but Kerry says patiently, "No, it's a new kit, they work well." Enter Mark from next door looking for the drug box, and Hawkeye orders a scalpel, towel clips, rakes, and -- well, he wants a hemostat, but he can't come up with the word "hemostat" until Lily guesses it, at which point he shouts, "Yeah, yeah, come on, hurry up!" Mark makes an "ohhh-kay" face. Kerry tries again to sell Hawkeye on the new kit's ease of use, and she attempts to explain how they work, but he interrupts her: "These are unreliable. Half the time you wind up in the pre-peritoneal space!" Kerry again points out that maybe he should just try it, and again he cuts her off: "I said no, dammit!" I don't mean to sound like I've missed the point, because the writers have driven it home in an eighteen-wheel Peterbilt, I assure you, but how did Hawkeye get this job if he doesn't know how to use current equipment? Anyway. Kerry looks taken aback; she shuts right up and drops her eyes. Hawkeye goes on about always doing an open technique, calling it "the gold standard," and he announces his intention to do just that, and then he picks up the percutaneous tray and hurls it against the opposite wall, snarling that "these are crap." Everyone else in the room freezes. Hawkeye stands there, head bobbing. Haleh comes in and says in her best you'll-have-to-act-out-worse-than-that-to-impress-me voice that the finger-amputation patient "is ready for his wrist block." Hawkeye says faintly, "All right," and then informs Kerry in a tone of false authority that she seems to have everything under control there, and "another patient needs me." Dear writers: Message. RECEIVED. Signed, everyone currently living on earth.