the refusal echoed downstairs
he was being a man about it and had refused codeine downstairs at the E.R. and was expressing gratitude for the growth experience
Context
Gately's white-knuckle stand rhyming out into the House around him: the resident who herniated himself carrying Gately's dead weight refuses even codeine at the same E.R. and calls the pain a growth experience. The discipline is contagious and communal — sobriety practiced not as private willpower but as a shared standard, the newer man declining the narcotic in the same building on the same night for the same reasons.