“Hey man, how are you?” said a man wearing a Boba Fett outfit as he bent over the bed of a young boy in a hospital gown.
It was a Sunday afternoon in the emergency room at Maimonides Medical Center in Brooklyn, where Dr. Alex Arroyo, the hospital’s director of pediatric emergency medicine, often wears one of 20 suits when visiting patients. His favorite is Boba Fett, the famous bounty hunter from the “Star Wars” movies.
“I love what I do, but it sure is hot in there!” said Dr. Arroyo, 48, who has worked at the hospital since 2006. He began wearing suits in 2021.
A die-hard “Star Wars” fan who grew up watching the original trilogy with his parents, Dr. Arroyo has passed that love on to his two youngest children, Grayson, 8, and Karra, 6. For New York Comic Con every year, the whole family dresses up, including his wife, Dr. Sharon Yellin, 44, a pediatric emergency medicine fellow who works at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. One year they went as a family from “Encanto”.
“I was the big, strong sister with the donkey,” Dr. Arroyo said, referring to the character Luisa.
Dr. Arroyo, who also has a 21-year-old son, Colin, from a previous marriage, was born in the Borough Park neighborhood of South Brooklyn — Maimonides, actually. He now lives less than a mile from the house where he grew up, in a 1920s three-story, four-bedroom stone house. He uses one of the extra bedrooms as his office and rents out the third floor.
“It’s a scary place to be in, because I’m also an active comic book collector,” he said of his office. “It’s wall to wall with toys. It’s my refuge away from the world.”
READY TO ROCK I wake up at 7:30 or 8. I probably don’t need my iPhone alarm, but I set it just in case. It’s “Sabotage” by the Beastie Boys. It puts me in the mood for the day.
The first thing I do is make a cup of coffee. I brew as much as I can in the Keurig. I’m not a coffee snob — I’ll have whatever’s available.
CHEF TIME While my kids run downstairs to steal some iPad or TV time, I have breakfast. My go-tos are pancakes, waffles, and quail eggs — I bought them at the grocery store around the corner as a joke one day, thinking my kids would find them hilarious because they’re so tiny, but they really enjoy them. However, they are extremely difficult to open. usually there are shells everywhere. Somehow, I’ve become the default cook for the house. My wife refers to my cooking style as “Iron Chef on steroids.” I cook the way I work — super fast and really efficient, but it’s really messy.
TECHNICAL CORRECTION I check my email first and then the WhatsApp groups from the hospital to see if anything happened during the night or if anyone needs anything. Then I’ll run to Instagram, scroll to X to find out what happened while I was sleeping. I’m something of a social media addict. Then my wife and I tackle the daily Wordle, Connections and mini New York Times Crossword challenges. We send each other our results to see who beat who today.
FIGHT CLUB Around 10 or 11 am, I head to jujitsu class at Windsor Terrace Martial Arts. I try to go as often as possible, sometimes up to 10 times a week. I’ve been doing it for about 17 months. I will usually do a special lesson on Sunday. I get a lot of joy out of strangling people I consider my friends. It’s an amazing outlet for the horrors of the world I see on a daily basis.
SPLIT TRACK As far as work goes, my Sundays vary. I could work one of three 12-hour shifts in the ER – starting at 7am, or 1pm. or at 7 p.m. – or I could be out of order. Today, I have a shift at 1 in the afternoon.
I run the department, so my time in the ER is limited to about 12 hours a week. My other time is occupied with being in the office and trying to manage the daily craziness of running an ER in NYC.
BE CAREFUL I take a shower and then go to the hospital. On a good day without traffic, it’s a six-minute drive. Usually parking is a challenge but not on the weekend which is nice. I get a cup of iced coffee from the Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner from the hospital.
TRAVELS I start my shift visiting kids as Boba Fett, so I head to my office to change into my outfit. It takes me about 20 minutes to put on and I need help. I wanted it to be as accurate to the movie as possible, so there are at least 20 different pieces that I have to put in. Good luck sitting or walking through the doors!
BOBA FETT WE’LL SEE YOU NOW I set aside an hour at the beginning of my shift to walk around in a suit, because I don’t actually work while wearing it. Even on Halloween, we discourage wearing any costumes — the last thing you want is SpongeBob SquarePants handling your child’s cardiac arrest.
I have at least four “Star Wars” costumes, including two Jedi and a fighter pilot. “Star Wars” is good because it’s a ubiquitous thing that reaches across generations — when kids recognize a character, they light up and their eyes kind of pop out of their heads.
THE REAL WORK BEGINS The 1 p.m. shift to 1 a.m. it’s the busiest of the three — I see patients almost non-stop. On a good day, I can sit for five minutes at a time to eat and pee, but sometimes that’s not possible because I’m running around like a maniac.
I see a lot of fevers – which, in a week-old baby, is one of the biggest emergencies we see in pediatric emergency medicine. I liken it to an adult with chest pain, because it’s usually indicative of something very serious, and we also have to rule out all the bad stuff. In the spring and summer, when the weather is nicer, I also see a lot of broken bones, especially broken arms. Kids fall down in the park, especially from the monkey bars.
SUNDAY CELEBRATION When I’m not working – or when I’m working a late shift – I’ll be doing something fun with my kids. They’re big foodies, so I’ll take them to Smorgasburg, the outdoor food market in Prospect Park. The french fry pan is my favorite. My kids love rainbow grilled cheese, but it looks gross.
Or we might take a trip to grandma’s house and have brunch. Then we might see a movie at Nitehawk Cinema — Prospect Park, which is great because it has food.
HOT DOG NIGHT When I’m home, around 5 or 5:30, I’ll make dinner for my kids. Their palates are not as sophisticated as those of many Brooklyn kids. They have a lot of chicken, pizza, hot dogs, pasta… and my son loves sushi.
After my wife and I put the kids to bed around 7:30 or 8, we’ll eat dinner around 8:30 — usually something more adventurous than a hot dog and mac and cheese.
TV TIME My wife and I will watch almost anything – dramas, comedies, period pieces. We recently finished “The Crown.” We are big fans of ‘Cobra Kai’, ‘Yellowstone’ and murder mystery documentaries.
DOOMSCROLLING Around midnight, I head upstairs to bed, where I spend 30 minutes doomscrolling whatever social media app I can to sleep.
The nice thing about working in emergency medicine is that I don’t get the “Sunday Scaries”. My schedule is constantly tossing and turning, so I’m in this perpetual cycle of “whatever comes, comes.”
