the cry for help that's been cried too often to hear
It occurs to Gately that the Help lady has cried Wolf for so many years that real shouts for real help are all going to be ignored.
Context
The #4 nurse who "Asks For Help" has been screaming her one word out her window for so long that, in the middle of an actual emergency, Gately grasps the trap: a real cry for real help now cannot be received as real, worn transparent by repetition. It is the theme's bleakest inversion of the missed connection — not a message garbled in transit but a channel so overused that urgency itself has stopped registering, the boy-who-cried-wolf recast as a permanent condition of a place where everyone is always calling for help.