How an Emergency Room Doctor Spends His Sundays (In Costume)
“Hey buddy, how are you?” said a man in a Boba Fett costume as he leaned 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 pediatrics, often wears one of more than two dozen costumes when he visits patients. His favorite is Boba Fett, the famous bounty hunter from the ‘Star Wars’ films.
“I love what I do, but it’s really hot out there!” said Dr. Arroyo, 48, who has worked at the hospital since 2006. He started wearing costumes in 2021.
Dr. Arroyo, a diehard “Star Wars” fan who grew up watching the original trilogy with his parents, has passed that love on to his two youngest children, Grayson, 8, and Karra, 6. For New York Comic Con, the whole family dresses up every year, 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,” said Dr. Arroyo, 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, to be exact. Now he lives less than a mile from his childhood home, in a four-bedroom, three-story, 1920s brownstone. He uses one of the guest bedrooms as his office and rents out the third floor.
“It’s a scary place to be in, because I’m also an avid comic book collector,” he said of his office. “It’s wall to wall with toys. It’s my sanctuary from the world.”
READY TO ROCK I wake up at 7:30 or 7:30. I probably don’t need my iPhone alarm, but I set it just in case. It’s ‘Sabotage’ by the Beastie Boys. It gets me in the mood for the day.
The first thing I do is make a cup of coffee. I put as much coffee as I can in the Keurig. I’m not a coffee snob — I’ll take whatever’s available.
CHEF HOUR While my kids run downstairs to steal some iPad or TV time, I make sure breakfast is ready. My favorites are pancakes, waffles, and quail eggs. I bought them one day as a joke at the grocery store around the corner, thinking my kids would find them hilarious because they’re so small, but they really enjoyed them. They’re extremely hard to open though; there are usually grenades everywhere. Somehow I’ve become the default chef in the house. My wife calls my cooking “Iron Chef on steroids.” I cook the way I work: extremely fast and very efficient, but it’s really messy.
TECHNICAL SOLUTION I check my email first, then the hospital WhatsApp groups to see if anything happened last night or if anyone needs anything. Then I run to Instagram, scrolling through X to catch up on what happened while I was asleep. I’m kind of a social media addict. Then my wife and I battle it out with our daily Wordle, Connections, and New York Times mini-crossword challenges. We text each other our results to see who beat who today.
FIGHT CLUB Around 10 or 11 in the morning I go to the jujitsu class at Windsor Terrace Martial Arts. I try to go there as often as possible, sometimes up to 10 times a week. I’ve been doing it for about 17 months. I usually give private lessons on Sundays. Strangling people I consider my friends makes me very happy. It’s a great outlet for the horrors of the world I see every day.
SPLIT TRACK When it comes to work, my Sundays vary. I could work one of the emergency department’s three 12-hour shifts—starting at 7 a.m., or 1 p.m., or 7 p.m.—or I could be off work. Today I have a 1:00 PM shift.
I manage the department, so my time in the ER is limited to about 12 hours a week. My other time is spent being in the office and trying to deal with the daily craziness that comes with running an ER in New York City.
GO INSIDE I take a shower and then head to the hospital. On a good day with no traffic, it’s a six-minute drive. Parking is usually a challenge, but not on the weekends, which is nice. I grab an iced coffee at Dunkin’ Donuts around the corner from the hospital.
ATTRACT I start my shift by visiting kids as Boba Fett, so I go to my office to put on my costume. It takes me about 20 minutes to put it on and I need help. I wanted it to be as film accurate as possible, so it has at least 20 different pieces that I have to put on. Good luck sitting or walking through doors!
BOBA FETT WILL SEE YOU NOW I set aside an hour at the beginning of my shift to walk around in costume, because I don’t really work while wearing it. Even on Halloween, we discourage costumes. The last thing you want is SpongeBob SquarePants picking up your kid’s cardiac arrest.
I have at least four Star Wars costumes, including two Jedis and a fighter pilot. Star Wars is good because it is ubiquitous and crosses generations – when kids recognize a character, they light up and their eyes pop out of their heads a little.
THE REAL WORK BEGINS The 1:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m. shift is the busiest of the three; I see patients almost non-stop. On a good day, I can sit down for five minutes to eat and pee, but sometimes I can’t because I’m running around like a maniac.
I see a lot of fever — which in a week-old baby is one of the biggest emergencies we can see in pediatrics. I compare that to an adult with chest pain, because it usually indicates something very serious and we have to rule out all the bad things. In the spring and summer, when the weather is better, I also see a lot of broken bones, especially broken arms. Kids falling in the park, especially from the monkey tails.
SUNDAY FUNDAY When I’m not working—or if I’m working the late shift—I do something fun with my kids. They’re big foodies, so I take them to Smorgasburg, the open-air food market in Prospect Park. The chip shop is my favorite. My kids love the rainbow grilled cheese, but it looks disgusting.
Or we might go to grandma’s house and have brunch. Then we might go see a movie at Nitehawk Cinema — Prospect Park, which is great because there’s food.
HOT DOG NIGHT When I get home, around 5 or 5:30, I make dinner for my kids. Their tastes are not as refined as many Brooklyn kids. They love chicken, pizza, hot dogs, pasta…and my son loves sushi.
After my wife and I put the kids to bed around 7:30 or 8:00, we eat dinner around 8:30. It’s usually something a little more adventurous than a hot dog and macaroni and cheese.
TV TIME My wife and I watch pretty much everything: dramas, comedies, period pieces. We recently finished “The Crown.” We’re big fans of ‘Cobra Kai’, ‘Yellowstone’ and murder mystery documentaries.
DOOMSCROLLING Around midnight I go upstairs to sleep, where I spend 30 minutes scrolling through all kinds of social media apps to fall asleep.
The great thing about working in the ER is that I don’t have the “Sunday fears.” My schedule is constantly changing, so I’m in a constant cycle of “whatever happens, happens.”
