How an Emergency Room Doctor Spends His Sundays (in Costume)

“Hey, buddy, how are you doing?” a man wearing a Boba Fett costume said 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 pediatric emergency medicine, often dons one of more than 20 costumes when he visits patients. His favorite is Boba Fett, the famed bounty hunter from the “Star Wars” films.

“I love what I do, but it’s sure hot in there!” said Dr. Arroyo, 48, who has worked at the hospital since 2006. He started wearing costumes 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 each year, the whole family dresses up, including his wife, Dr. Sharon Yellin, 44, a fellow pediatric emergency medicine physician who works at NewYork-Presbyterian Brooklyn Methodist Hospital. One year they went as the 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 — at Maimonides, in fact. Now he lives less than a mile from the house where he grew up, in a four-bedroom, three-story 1920s brownstone. He uses one of the spare bedrooms as his office and rents out the third floor.

“It’s a frightening place to be inside of because I’m also an active-duty comic collector,” he said of his office. “It’s filled wall to wall with toys. It’s my sanctuary away from the world.”