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This situation is more certain doom than McKay has imagined he would be in for a while.
Granted, he never actually thought he would be millions of light years away from home, trapped in a gateship (yes, he still calls it a gateship in his head - if Major Sheppard survives, he can suck it) with a seemingly irretractable drive pod, trying to get it to budge and praying it happens before hard vacuum or Wraith ships got to them.
Not that McKay believes in any kind of god, per se. It’s just that the Wraith are the starting point for all of his worst nightmares now and he really does not want his brain producing nightmares of the current scenario... Especially not when he's supposed to be tracking down control pathways so they can get the rest of the way through the gate.
Even though he is not totally convinced, despite all the effort he's putting in, that what he is trying to do here will work. There are likely hundreds of thousands of pathways, and even if they had a hundred people running tests back on Atlantis right now, it would still take hours they do not have to correctly identify the one to the drive pods.
At least I don't have to explain what I'm doing to a hundred other people, he tells himself as he starts cataloguing the pathways that are there. And this lets him think about something other than gigantic alien bugs attaching themselves to human necks and killing them.
The thought alone makes McKay nauseous.
But it is, in fact, a good distraction for Ford and Teyla. Sheppard waking up and the subsequent discussion has all of their attention. He can work on this and keep half an ear on the conversation at hand for when he is actively asked to contribute. McKay does keep his normal muttering to thought level volume, though, so their attention stays where it is.
But then Sheppard asks for Beckett on the radio, and all pretense is lost for a second. McKay has to keep his eyes focused on the tablet in front of him to keep the bug attached to Sheppard’s neck out of his direct line of sight.
One look at that is a one-way ticket down a nightmare-fueled express train.
Knuckle down, Rodney. Knuckle down and fix it.
It doesn't complete do the job, but it's enough to get McKay back on track. For now, anyway.