Line #58 Series/UntoldStoriesOfTheER


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6
7	->''"These are the real stories of the ER, that doctors never talk about."''
8
9	A show on the Discovery Network channels. The show involves dramatic reenactments of cases that have been seen in Emergencies Rooms. Usually the actor [[AsHimself portraying the doctor is the doctor from the story.]] The stories for the most part are real but with some details changed for compression purposes, the patient did not give permission to be used, or the patient could not be found afterwards. Three or four different stories are shown intertwined in each episode.
10
11	----
12	!!'''This show provides examples of:'''
13	* AbuseMistake:
14	** As an example of something innocent, assumed to be abuse, in "Halloween in the ER" a boy came in with a undiagnosed mild case of Brittle Bone Disease. The number of old micro-fractures implied abuse to the doctors. The mother's defensive behaviour (even before the accusation), and both parents' response to the accusation — up to and including kidnapping the child from the ER — did not help matters.
15	** Something else mistaken for abuse, in which a boy with unexplained bruising prompted suspicions of child abuse. It turned out instead to be a case of completely unintentional neglect: The boy had ''scurvy'', because his parents were ignorant of proper nutrition, and thus fed him almost nothing but oatmeal because that was what he liked.
16	* TheAlcoholic: ''Many'' cases are caused or complicated by the patient being drunk, on drugs, or both.
17	* AlliterativeTitle: The episode, "Medieval Mayhem".
18	* AllOfThem: The boy who gave himself magnesium poisoning by drinking too much antacid liquid. "How much did you take?" "The whole bottle."
19	* AlmightyJanitor: In one episode, a woman came to the ER, unconscious. The doctors couldn't tell what was wrong, and the only other person they could reach who knew her medical history was her husband, who could only speak Punjabi. The nearest translator for that language was half an hour away and the woman didn't even have five minutes... cue a janitor saving the day because he just happened to speak the same language.
20	** There are quite a few lesser cases of this in various episodes. Janitors usually have power/hand tools that the ER staff don't have in their usual bag of tricks, so they're called when they need bolt cutters. In one case, they all had flexible thin rules on them that they could slip into a shell loader that the patient got his finger stuck in.
21	* AnArmAndALeg: Very common. Most of the time the ER docs try their best to put them back on. One case the man lost his legs after being hit by a train.
22	* AprilFoolsPlot: At least one episode has a subplot that takes place on April Fools' Day. When a hospital volunteer suddenly presents with confusion that clears up just as abruptly, her fiancé believes she's just flexing her acting skills by playing an April Fool's joke. [[spoiler:She's not]].
23	** At the end of the episode:
24	--->'''Her:''' Do you still wanna marry me?\
25	'''Him:''' Of course! Do you still wanna marry me, after I was such a jerk?\
26	'''Her:''' No. I don't.\
27	''[long pause]''\
28	'''Her:''' April Fools!
29	* AsHimself: A lot of retired doctors, or doctors working fewer hours come on to tell the stories and reenact them.
30	* AssShove: One male patient, who actually bribed the doctors not to do any paperwork, had to have a dildo removed from his anus once it got stuck. This is a fairly common story and probably makes up about 1 percent of ER visits.
31	* AttentionWhore: Anyone with Münchausen syndrome is one of these. They fake medical disorders to gain attention and sympathy.
32	* BaitAndSwitch: In "ER Blues," the first patient that comes in is a middle aged woman prone to anxiety with her [[PreciousPuppy support dog]]. The doctor thinks she's probably just got some minor gastrointestinal issue and is probably wanting some attention so she diverts attention away from her to what seems to be the serious patient: a man who was run over by the trailer for his motorcycle. He's definitely in bad shape and has a broken pelvis but then it turns out that the truly serious case was the woman who came in. Turns out that she has a ruptured bowel caused by her support dog (who couldn't be more than five pounds) jumping on her stomach and if it hadn't been caught, she would have died from septic shock since her white blood cell count was 14,000.
33	* BeautyIsNeverTarnished: Averted in some cases. One woman was brutally mauled by a mountain lion. Doctors managed to reconstruct her face, but she cried when they took the bandages off and she saw how bad she looked. They then showed her photos of how she looked before they stitched her up, and she realized that she was lucky to even ''have'' a face.
34	* BigDamnHeroes: Happens a lot, especially when the doctors put their own lives on the line. During the rampage of Damacio Ibarra Torres, one nurse dragged a doctor who was shot in the head into another room to prevent a CoupDeGrace from the gunman. He then went back for a gurney and quickly wheeled the doctor into a trauma bay. After that, a neurosurgeon left the guarded cafeteria so he could then treat the doctor... while the gunman's location was still unknown.
35	* BigHeroicRun: One doctor had to run across the ER, jump, and land on the bed on his knees to catch a baby a woman was pushing out fast.
36	* BlatantLies: Done by patients sustaining embarrassing injuries.
37	** Special points go to the man who shows up at the ER with a vibrator stuck in his rectum:
38	-->'''Doctor:''' How did this...?
39	-->'''Patient:''' I don't know!
40	-->'''Doctor:''' What do you mean, you don't know?
41	-->'''Patient:''' It doesn't matter! Just take it out...! [looks to the hall] ...quietly.
42	** Another episode has a woman claim that her husband is "perfectly healthy"... while being unconscious at the ER. Their daughter tells the doctor that he is [[TheAlcoholic an alcoholic]] who drinks six beers a day.
43	* BloodIsTheNewBlack: And vomit, urine, pus, feces, alcohol... pretty much any doctor can expect to be showered with bodily fluids that you didn't know existed over the course of his career.
44	** A neurosurgeon on call was rushing to the hospital to try to save a man who crashed his motorcycle with no helmet. Along the way he came across another man who did the same thing, so he was delayed trying to help that man until the ambulance arrived so he could then go to the hospital and save both. The other doctors and nurses were stunned as he came running in, in his dress shirt and pants covered in blood.
45	** Another fairly graphic example happened in the episode "Drama Mama." The featured doctor was dealing with a combative patient who appeared to have a tension pneumothorax (in layman's terms, a collapsed lung). In actuality he didn't, and when the doctor poked his chest to relieve the pressure, a quite literal fountain of blood squirted ''everywhere''... but mostly on his shocked girlfriend.
46	** A fecal example occurs in "Cows and Stilettos." The victim was involved in an auto accident in which he hit a cow. As the featured doctor states, cows have a tendency to "defecate at high speed and volume," meaning the poor guy was ''covered'' in...well, you know. The smell was so awful, they brought multiple fans into the ER. Also, the radiology department initially refused to give the victim a CAT scan to assess a potentially life-threatening injury unless he was cleaned up. The doctor persuaded them to put the victim in the CAT scan machine "alive and stinky" rather than clean and dead.
47	* BloodSplatteredInnocents: All too often. One woman was cradling the body of her friend who was shot, telling him to PleaseWakeUp. Paramedics had to tell her they would look at the (obviously) dead friend after they checked her out. Turns out all the blood wasn't just his- some of it was from the two point blank shots to her head.
48	* BoisterousWeakling: A drunk college girl walks into the ER, threatens a nurse claiming she knows Taekwondo, and promptly collapses.
49	* BornInAnElevator: In "Don't Push It!", a baby is born in an elevator during a power outage.
50	* BornLucky: The one way some of the patients survive.
51	** One man fell asleep at the wheel and crashed into a chain link fence, which sent one of the fence pipes straight through his head. The doctors had no idea how to treat them: "We don't see these types of injuries in the ER. These types of injuries usually show up in the morgue." After X-ray and CAT scans showed that it had somehow managed to miss every single nerve, vein, and artery in his head, they pulled it out with a team of vascular surgeons standing by in case something went bad. He walked away with nothing more than some mangled flesh and a few broken teeth.
52	* BusmansHoliday:
53	** One neurosurgeon was called in to perform on a motorcycle driver that was not wearing a helmet. On the way to the hospital he stumbled upon another motorcycle driver that crashed without a helmet, so he kept this guy stabilized until the ambulance showed up, covering himself in blood in the meantime.
54	** On a cruise ship, a kid slammed his hand in a door so hard that it was barely hanging on by a flap of skin. The sick bay doctor paged the entire ship asking if there were any hand surgeons on board, seriously doubting any sort of response as hand surgeons often travel from hospital to hospital. Five minutes later, three hand surgeons showed up in Hawaiian shirts asking where the patient was.
55	** An off-duty heart surgeon who drove his young daughter to hospital after she fell from a bike, ended operating on a man with a ruptured aorta because there was no other specialist available.
56	* CampStraight:
57	** Resident Nurse Terry Foster has a campy voice and demeanour. He also has a wife.
58	** The blue-skinned man in "Why am I blue?" is completely camp, but his sexual orientation is unclear. [[spoiler:His behavior turns out to be a [[NotHimself side-effect]] of the same sickness that was causing his skin to turn blue]].
59	* ChekhovsGun: If the reenactment or narration makes much of a seemingly minor detail, you can be pretty sure it will turn out to be relevant to the patient's diagnosis, or resurface in some other way:
60	** In "Ice Cold Mom", doctors wonder if the eponymous patient has recently been on vacation, since she appears to be tanned. They ask her husband about it, and he tells them that she's always been tanned, even though the rest of her Irish family is very pale. The patient turns out to have Addison's disease, whose symptoms include darkening of the skin. When the actual patient (i.e. not the actor) is shown, treatment of the disease has restored her skin to its natural paleness.
61	** In "Minutes to Live", Dr. Joy Slade's introduction puts a lot of focus on her habit of wearing expensive shoes in the emergency department. At the end of the episode, when Slade believes her patient has not survived, a nurse who recognizes her by her shoes is able to inform her that in fact she ''did'' survive. "The way that I found out that my patient was alive, was because of my shoes!"
62	** A child who fell on a cactus is healed by applying bikini wax to retrieve the spines. The doctor got the idea from a wax ad in a magazine he was reading before the child was wheeled in.
63	** In "ER Blues," the patient says that her stomach pain was caused by her support dog. Turns out that she was right; the small dog (no more than five pounds) was jumping on her belly and that caused her bowel to rupture.
64	* ChekhovsGunman: In "Sobering Situation", the patient, father of a school football star, needs to wear a helmet for a rare procedure. However, the hospital's helmet cannot be found. They use the son's football helmet.
65	* ClosestThingWeGot:
66	** The usual setup is inverted in a segment with a pug that ate the amputated finger of a pianist. A veterinarian wasn't available to operate on the dog, and the doctor was reluctant to sacrifice the animal in order to retrieve the finger. So he called a surgeon to operate on the dog, who refused, and then on a gastroenterologist, who agreed to retrieve the finger with a probe. This turned to be surprisingly easy and it was done in a minute.
67	** A surgeon had a girl who was biten on the jaw by a dog. First problem, the family had no insurance for plastic surgery, but the surgeon called a faculty friend who had become a celebrity plastic surgeon. Second problem, the plastic surgery was delayed for two hours. Third problem, the plastic surgeon got ''in a traffic jam''. The first surgeon ended doing all the surgery himself while sending pics to his friend to make sure he was doing everything right.
68	* TheCoatsAreOff: In an unusual case of this, when shooter Damacio Ibarra Torres was shooting any doctor he could find, the doctors all took off their coats to claim they were nurses.
69	* CodeSilver: Happens every so often.
70	* ComicallyMissingThePoint:
71	** In "The Nun and the Other Lady", an elderly nun and a foul-mouthed prostitute tripping on pills are placed next to each other at the ER. HilarityEnsues. At the end, the nun believes that the prostitute was a first-time mom going into labor and that the cop who arrived to arrest her for stealing the pills was her husband.
72	** Other episode has a man apparently oblivious to the car crash he was in, being more concerned with talking to his boss in the phone that with the injuries he might have suffered. And when the doctors show him photos of the wreck, his instant reaction is thinking in how bad his wife will take the news... about ''the car.''
73	* CompeteForTheMaidensHand: One of the most ridiculously funny twists in "Medieval Mayhem" is the revelation that, yes, the fight between the drunken knights was an actual duel for a maiden's hand, and the concerned maiden turns up at the hospital looking for them. The kicker? The two didn't hurt each other, they were so drunk that they fell on their own weapons.
74	* CoincidentalBroadcast: The segment "Runway Collapse". A doctor and nurses watch a live fashion show on the hospital TV when a model faints on camera. The model is brought in and treated by the very same doctor, who also watches her again [[BookEnds on another live fashion show]] after she makes a recovery.
75	* CoughingUpBlood: Sometimes patients come into the ER doing this, for various reasons. For instance, one man who was a landlord accidentally swallowed a thumbtack, which had fallen from the ceiling as his tenant was using them to secure a poster up there.
76	* CrazyPrepared: ER docs have to be. And some patients as well.
77	** One mother had her daughter (who were both deaf) wear a bunch of bracelets. On the bracelets, hidden from view, was info about her and other people, including the contact info of nearby relatives and to call 911. This saved the woman's life when she started to flatline repeatedly.
78	* TheCuckoolanderWasRight:
79	** In "Man with Two Faces", a man with untreated schizophrenia claimed that he had "someone else's face". The doctor initially assumed this to be a delusion or hallucination, but the patient showed him a driver's license that confirmed his face had indeed changed significantly. It turned out he had [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Superior_vena_cava_syndrome a lung tumour pressing against a large vein]], preventing blood from draining from his face.
80	** "Delusional Bride" has a bride carted to the ER mere hours before her wedding, with everyone in her family claiming that she is either hysterical or faking because she got cold feet in the eleventh hour. Turns out she botfly larvae under her skin during her bachelorette party in Costa Rica and they are [[BodyHorror growing in her head]].
81	* CuttingTheKnot: Sometimes required due to red tape and paperwork.
82	** A patient who desperately needed surgery couldn't be treated at the small clinic where he was diagnosed, but his insurance wouldn't pay for the ambulance service to take him to a bigger hospital. Unable to cut through the red tape to arrange transport for their patient, the doctors hit upon a counter-intuitive solution: they called 911, which the ambulance service is contractually obliged to respond to even when the call comes from a hospital. The bill from the ambulance service went to the hospital, and not the patient.
83	** When a hospital was placed in lockdown while under attack by a gunman, A neurosurgeon needed to get to the ER to treat his fellow doctor who was shot in the head. The guard wouldn't let him out, so he left through the kitchen's one-way exit. Note that the gunman hadn't been located, so he could have been shot at any second.
84	** How do you treat a patient who believes she has a demon in her liver? Why, you call in an exorcist! Patient didn't need to go to Psych, and they were able to treat the actual medical condition that she caused herself in an attempt to get rid of the demon.
85	* DeadpanSnarker: Many nurses and doctors, mostly in response to patients making their work more difficult by being drunk, assholes, having phobias or lying.
86	* DelicateAndSickly: Most cases involving young children fall under this trope but there are some standouts.
87	** A six-year-old boy who suffers a stroke and is rendered both paralyzed and mute; not only does the doctor tending to him discuss how absolutely ''terrifying'' this must be for the kid but his mother is a nurse so she knows ''exactly'' what could go wrong.
88	** The daughter in the subplot with a young mother randomly going in and out of flatline in "Diagnose Me!" is deaf and while they are able to get a translator, the mother is well-aware she could die and is quite distressed about this.
89	* DeusExMachina: Sometimes can save the day.
90	** One case had a woman who turned out to be three months pregnant violently hemorrhaging in her uterus. Problem was that the only person who knew her medical history was her husband who only spoke [[https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Punjabi_language Punjabi]] and the nearest translator was 30 minutes away, and she did not even have five minutes. Luckily, a [[AlmightyJanitor janitor that worked there had immigrated from a country that spoke it.]]
91	* DoorstopBaby: One of the most dramatic examples in recent memory is a pregnant woman entering a restroom and dropping a non full-term girl ''in'' the toilet, then leaving without telling anybody.
92	* DrivenToSuicide: A lot of cases show up in the ER.
93	** A medical student who had recently failed his final exams hung himself in his own triage bay- he only survived because he was already in the hospital.
94	** One man became so distraught about his wife's death in the ER he planned on doing a SuicideByCop, by shooting and managing to kill one of the doctors.
95	* EarAche:
96	** One woman had a [[https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/8/83/June_Bug_-_Underside.jpg june bug]] crawl into her ear. The doctor had to squirt a lot of lidocaine into her ear to drown the bug. After 20 minutes, he pulled it out, only for it to revive, and start to struggle in his forceps.
97	** A man stabbed himself in the ear with an ice pick to remove the evil spirits in there.
98	** A man was brought in whose only apparent symptom was intermittent shrieking. The doctors were ready to send him up to psych, until a nurse discovered a bug gnawing on the inside of his ear.
99	* EatenAlive: Any patient bearing parasites, and there are several.
100	* EntertaininglyWrong: Some patients mistake serious symptoms for something far more innocuous, or something supernatural but medically inconsequential. This includes at least two patients who misinterpreted their grand mal seizures: One who mistook them for simple ''fainting'', and another who mistook them for demonic possession.
101	* EpicFail: The duel of the drunk knights in "Medieval Mayhem", as it is eventually discovered that each knight injured himself with his own weapon, and on the first strike, too.
102	* EvilAllAlong:
103	** At the end of "Drama Mama", it is discovered that the afflicted girlfriend of the delirious man yelling for his car was the one who caused his psychosis when she stabbed him with a knitting needle during an argument, and she is arrested.
104	** Happens again in "Who Shot Who?" Several people are brought with bullet wounds to the ER, and the Police arrives later because they believe one robbed a liquor shop. The CCTV reveals that the robber is the one guy the doctor trusted the most, and who almost used her sympathy to get away with it, while the others are unrelated to the robbery.
105	** In a case where two men that seemed to not know each other had both been shot, the wife of one of the men is very agitated the entire time, and actively trying to get her husband out of the hospital. Turns out that not only do the men know each other, they're co-workers and lovers...who had been shot by the wife after she caught them together. She gets arrested when it's revealed that she was trying to get her husband out of the hospital in case the cops showed up.
106	* EyeScream:
107	** One man inadvertently poured bleach into his eyes- his wife had put some bleach into a bottle with an eyedropper for treating her athlete's foot.
108	** Another man's eyeball had been forced forwards by abnormal pressure within the eye socket, protruding out in front of his eyelids. The ER staff had to improvise a covering from a taped-on paper cup to shield it from light while they waited for a specialist to explain how to safely get it back into place.
109	** A criminal with an inflated eyelid's eye pops out when the doctors cut some tendons to relieve the pressure.
110	* FanDisservice: Hey, look at this cute, blonde, half-naked girl! She has a pencil-thick live worm sticking out of her rectum!
111	* FlayingAlive: An extremely intoxicated man with torn-up clothes was being treated for numerous gash-wounds. When he leaned over to vomit, his long hair ''and scalp'' drooped forward over his face. Turns out he'd gotten his curls caught in the mechanism of a mall escalator, which yanked on them hard enough to deglove most of his skull.
112	* FlorenceNightingaleEffect: At the end of "Medieval Mayhem", the maiden chooses [[TakeAThirdOption neither]] of the sparring knights. However, a young nurse becomes interested in a knight as she drives him away on a wheelchair. The narrating doctor confirms that they became a couple.
113	* FromBadToWorse: Several, of course! In one particular case, a man accidentally punctured a can of spray paint, which got all over his face, so he went to the ER complaining that his eyes were burning. Turns out he was so sensitive to it that his throat started to swell completely shut.
114	* FromDressToDressing: Dr. Candice Myhre, takes her shirt off and uses it as a bandage for a guy who received a huge cut in his leg on the beach.
115	* GagPenis:
116	** An 'unresponsive' patient dressed like a zombie for Halloween sports a massive erection when his friends are brought in.
117	-->'''Female friend:''' Well he doesn't look "unresponsive" to me.
118	** There are also at least two patients with long-term erections after adverse reactions to Viagra.
119	* GoodVictimsBadVictims: Most of the show's patients are "good" victims. Others are difficult to have much (if any) sympathy for, generally because they're assholes, or caused their condition with stupidity, or both.
120	** In "Diagnosis Grumpy", an elderly patient is brought in on suspicions of cardiovascular disease. As the title suggests, he is pretty grumpy, but worse than that, he spends most of his time making misogynistic comments towards the female staff. He's so abrasive and disrespectful that he puts most of them on edge, even prompting one to storm out.
121	*** He becomes more sympathetic later, when a neighbour's young daughter comes to visit, and he suddenly morphs into a kindly old man, treating her like a cherished granddaughter. In the end, it's revealed that his unpleasant behaviour is the result of unresolved grief over his deceased wife. Once this comes to light, he apologizes to the women he insulted, and looks set to turn over a new leaf.
122	** More than one patient ends up having his infidelity discovered when more than one of his partners visits him in the ER. Even if you feel sympathetic for their condition, it's hard to feel bad for them getting found out and facing their partners' wrath.
123	*** One is a mixed case: A young man's adultery was causing so much stress that he gave himself a stroke. Hard not to feel at least a little bad for a guy who can't speak, and can't even react to seeing his wife and two girlfriends discover each other, except for the heart monitor showing his heart rate skyrocket. Then the sympathy levels plummet again when, after he recovers, the doctor advises him to learn from this and stop cheating if only for his own health, and he says he "can't". ''And then he asks the doctor if she's married.''
124	** Some of the "bad victims" aren't even actually victims. See PlayingSick.
125	* GoodAllAlong: A doctor comes late because her car was broken into, and she was robbed of some prized sunglasses, among other things. The patient next door to hers just happens to be a teenager wearing the same sunglasses, who refuses to take them off, keeps changing his story, and is scared of having his parents or the police involved. Naturally, she needles him [[CannotSpitItOut without actually accusing him outright]]. However, it turns out that the teenager's glasses are really his, and that he was dodgy because he was beaten up by [[BarbaricBully bullies]].
126	* GranolaGirl: Surprisingly PlayedForDrama in an episode where the girl was eight months pregnant, she had been wounded three times in a shootout, and she was paranoid about taking any drugs or X-rays for fear that they might hurt her unborn son. It was a very big problem for her: she had been obsessive about having a healthy diet, protecting the fetus from noise and playing music or singing to him, and had everything ready for an all-natural birth at home that went to the trash when she had to get an emergency cesarean birth at the hospital.
127	* GroinAttack: Usually self-inflicted:
128	** A patient came in about an erection he'd had for a few hours after taking Viagra. When his wife arrives and discovers his mistress there, the ensuing fight starts with one woman reaching across his bed to attack the other, leaning right over his groin and causing him even more pain.
129	** One patient had taken black market Viagra to surprise his girlfriend for Valentine's Day. Problem was it was ''horse'' Viagra, and he went into the ER after the third day with the erection. The urologist was called as the blood was so clotted, it had to be manually drained with surgery.
130	** Another patient had this when his girlfriend suggested he stick his penis into a camping stove and she would.... have relations with him on the other side. Needless to say, he got stuck, and had to come into the ER with the stove '''still attached.''' A urologist had to drain the blood out to reduce the swelling enough so the camp stove could be removed.
131	** Perhaps the most literal one was a man who was accidentally impaled '''''down there...''''' with a shovel.
132	* HalloweenEpisode: The segments "Halloween in the ER" and "Zombie Uprising".
133	* HeadTurningBeauty: In the segment "Runway Collapse", a fashion model is brought to the ER after she faints in a show. The whole male staff is stunned, and many (male) nurses volunteer to work with her. When a man from the same show arrives with the exact same symptoms, nobody gives a damn.
134	* HighPressureBlood: Some real gushers, either from severed arteries or from body cavities filling up from internal hemorrhaging.
135	* HospitalHottie: Much of the featured medical personnel is attractive.
136	* HumanPopsicle:
137	** A 24-year-old man was exposed to subzero temperatures for over four hours. His internal temperature was only 74°F (23°C). Since it happened over such a long period of time, his body went into hibernation and shut his brain down, so the oxygen loss did not do as much damage.
138	** This was also deliberately invoked for therapeutic hypothermia: After massive heart attacks, some doctors will lower the patient's internal temperature to 89°F (32°C) to slow down the brain and heart enough that they can heal without aggravating the damage.
139	** A patient came in presenting with severe confusion and other symptoms. She had not been exposed to cold, so the doctors were astonished to find that her temperature was 88°F (31°C), and wondered how on earth she was still conscious.
140	* HuskyRusskie: A massive, [[VodkaDrunkenski drunk]] Russian guy wakes up at the ER when he was going to get a head wound stitched and goes bananas. He's big enough to get on his feet and stand despite being tied to a stretcher. When the doctor asks a security guard to do something, he sarcastically asks if he wants him to shoot him, because there is no other possible way he can stop him. The Russian is [[DidYouJustPunchOutCthulhu brought down by an old female nurse]] who walks in, sees what is happening, and immediately pushes the back of the stretcher, throwing the guy off balance and to the ground. The ER run to tie the guy to ''another'' stretcher with [[DuctTapeForEverything duct tape]].
141	* ImpaledWithExtremePrejudice: Multiple:
142	** A jogger with a massive branch through his neck, that nearly left the doctor speechless because the man remained conscious and talking.
143	** A man with a shovel [[GroinAttack in the groin]]
144	** A man with a fence post through his cheek
145	** Two teenage girls who ended with a pole ramming through both (and the car seat of the first one) at a car accident.
146	** Two people (a drunk, naked man and a four-year-old girl in a bathing suit) who fell on a cactus in separate incidents
147	** A stripper who had a metal-pointed stiletto stuck into her face during a fight with a rival.
148	* {{Irony}}: A man becomes sick, leaving him speechless, unresponsive, and walking around aimlessly. It just happens that it is also Halloween, and he is wearing a zombie costume.
149	* IronicName: "Runaway Asthma" has a drug-addict named Rob Runner who insists on being discharged from the hospital against the doctor's advice. On his way out, he tries to '''rob''' the hospital's gift shop and to '''run''' away when security shows up, only to collapse because of his asthma, and is re-hospitalized. The nurses make good notice of the coincidence.
150	* JustOneLittleMistake: A doctor accidentally injects serum into a convulsing patient. When the patient stops convulsing, the doctor realizes that the patient is PlayingSick so he can get drugs.
151	* LatePregnancyRealization: In one episode "Don't Push It!", a fifteen year old girl comes in complaining of stomach pain, whilst completely oblivious to her bulging belly in contrast to her skinny body. As soon as the nurses help cut off her pants, the teen gives birth to a baby girl right on the spot and she didn't even know it. Her father walks in shocked, asking why did this happen. While her fifteen year old boyfriend is sitting nearby with his head in his hands. The teen is completely dumbfounded, insisting that she didn't know that she was pregnant and that she couldn't be.
152	* LikeFatherLikeSon: In "Don't Touch Me!", Dr. Mason has to perform a section on a germaphobic boy with a collapsed lung, but he refuses consent because of his phobia, and there is no second doctor available to approve the treatment of the patient against his will. [[TakeAThirdOption As a third option]], Mason calls the boy's father, who is [[OhCrap also germaphobic]].
153	* LostInCharacter: In "Medieval Mayhem", two knights at a Renaissance Fair get drunk and resort to a duel when they both fall for the same girl. When they both sober up, they resort to the far more civil method of letting her choose. [[TakeAThirdOption She chooses neither of them]] [[BittersweetEnding but at least one ends up dating one of the nurses]].
154	* MacGyvering: Sometimes has to be done to save a patient.
155	** One patient came in with a large hole in her heart. The doctor temporarily plugged it using two inflated Foley catheters to bide time until the cardiac surgeons got there.
156	** A little girl fell into a cactus and covered her stomach and limbs with needles, so the ER team initially tried pulling the needles out one-by-one using tweezers. When the doctor realized this was going to take hours, he got the idea to use bikini wax, recalling an ad he saw earlier in a magazine. It worked like a charm, and doubles as a ChekhovsGun, too!
157	*** A similar technique was used for the drunk man who had fallen naked onto a cactus. The doctor sent a staff member to get some bikini wax, but the store didn't have any, so the doctor instructed him to buy as much white glue as he could find. It worked.
158	** A patient was poisoned with antifreeze. The hospital didn't have the antidote in stock, but the doctor was aware that alcohol could have many of the same effects, so he sent someone to buy some cheap rum to give the patient. [[note]] The cure to Ethylene glycol posioning was originally ethanol until the invention of Fomepizole in 1997. Hospitals have been known to use cheap vodka in case they run out of Fomepizole as they literally can't make it worse. [[/note]]
159	** A patient needed a helmet for a rare procedure, but the hospital's helmet could not be found. He was operated while in his son's football helmet.
160	** A [[HuskyRusskie giant Russian]] went nuts while at the ER and almost made out of the building despite being tied to a stretcher. The doctors tied him with [[DuctTapeForEverything duct tape]] to ''two'' stretchers until he calmed down.
161	* MadeOfIron: Some of the patients. Unfortunately, it doesn't protect you from long-term damage and side effects.
162	** One patient had been stabbed in the heart, with blood pouring into the pericardium/sac around it. By the time he got into the OR, there was over a liter of blood in the sac, and the pressure got too great for his heart to pump anymore. The second they drained it, his heartbeat suddenly went back to normal along with his blood pressure.
163	** A doctor was shot in the head by a gunman in the hospital. He came to after 30 seconds wondering what happened. He still was major neurological issues with physical movements and PTSD, but is nonetheless very glad to be alive.
164	* MagicalDefibrillator:
165	** A patient had an alarmingly fast heart rate due to meth use. When he tried to run off he got tasered, which defibrillated his heart and restored normal rhythm.
166	** Believed by a woman who used a defibrillator on herself without even knowing how it is used, and got herself knocked out and two burn marks on her chest for the trouble.
167	* MajorInjuryUnderreaction: One episode has a delusional man walking into the ER with a comically large hunting knife sticking out of his back. He feels no pain and refuses to believe that he has a knife until he is shown a radiography of it.
168	* MeatgrinderSurgery: Done a lot in the ER, usually to keep a patient alive long enough to get them to the actual surgeons. Even the proper medical treatment can be this. One patient's brain was swollen, so the doctors trepanned them to relieve pressure. Meaning they drilled a hole in the patient's skull- not even with an electric drill, but a hand-operated one.
169	* MinorCrimeRevealsMajorPlot: More like minor injury reveals major underlying condition. One episode had a minor concussion (kid took a baseball to the head while wearing a helmet) turn into a major brain bleed. Turns out he was slowly being poisoned by something in his house that was causing his bones to be weaker then they should be.
170	* MissConception: In "Don't Push It!", a full-term 15-year-old teenager is brought into the ER and gives birth to a healthy baby girl. Her boyfriend insists that she cannot be pregnant because, you see, they only did it standing up, and his brother told him you cannot get pregnant that way.
171	* TheMissusAndTheEx:
172	** A man's wife and mistress meet when he is wheeled to the ER with a [[GagPenis permanent erection]].
173	** In another episode, the nurse is the (former) mistress and the patient is the "wife". She hides behind a potted plant rather than facing her or her ex-boyfriend.
174	* MoreHypnotizableThanHeThinks: A Native American woman shows symptoms of tuberculosis, but it could also be because she's already vaccinated. Unfortunately, she can't remember if she was and what was the last clinic she was treated in. The doctor throws his hands in the air and tries hypnosis, thinking it won't work anyway... and she immediately says a clinic name and phone number.
175	* MyBelovedSmother:
176	** The mother in "Delusional Bride", who acts like her daughter's wedding is her own wedding and accuses her daughter of ruining it by faking an illness... which is actually completely real.
177	** The titular "Drama Mama", mother to a teenage beauty contestant, who keeps berating the female doctors for not telling her daughter's problem and solving it within seconds, hitting on the male doctors, and questioning every test they try and calling them useless. In the end, it is found that she caused her daughter's sickness by feeding her tapeworm eggs to help her lose weight.
178	** One of Dr. Sarah Carrier's patients had a MyBelovedSmother. It was to the point that she came into the ER with him and was trying to make decisions about his medical care, as well as boss the doctors around. The patient, who was twenty-one, let her. He also whined, complained, and begged her to get him something to eat the whole time.
179	* MyGodWhatHaveIDone "Birthday Party Gone", the doctor figures out the source of the poisoning is from the soup the grandmother made, as she accidentally added a tobacco leaf from her garden into it. She's horrified when she learns she's the reason her grandson's ill.
180	* MyGreatestSecondChance: Dr. Kapoor became an ER doctor because his father died in a medical center without ER and the doctor could not identify his ailment in time. Years later, he saves a woman suffering from a rare genetic disorder, in part, because he read on that very disease while researching what may have killed his father.
181	* NeverTrustATrailer: The commercial break in "Zombie Uprising" shows a nurse telling the doctor that his patient died one year ago according to medical records. This is just a prank by the nurse.
182	* NiceGuy: Many of the doctors and nurses featured on the show are very kind and friendly people. A few that stand out are Nurse Terry Foster, Dr. Christopher Michos, and Dr. Kip Adrian. Nurse Terry has a very gentle, soothing beside manner. Dr. Adrian has a reputation among his colleagues for never letting anything get him down. If the dramatization in "Ice Cold Mom" is to be believed, he can even stay friendly to [[BrattyHalfPint a kid who screams through a shot, throws a lollipop he was just given, and then sticks his tongue out at him]].
183	* NotNowKiddo: If a kid knows what's wrong with their parent, they're often dismissed at first by their other parent and/or the ER staff. A notable case is "Zombies and Headaches" when the patient's son was able to identify that his mother had a very rare and deadly form of meningitis while his father, fed up with his vacation ruined by his wife's headache and his son and daughter fighting over the tablet, dismisses it. Not only was the boy right but he managed to save his mother's life.
184	** Averted in "ER Blues" when the MouthyKid of the patient reveals that his father's broken pelvis was caused by his mother running over him with a trailer hitch ''twice'' because she was mad about how expensive his motorcycle was.
185	* NotWhatItLooksLike: A doctor has to... err... "manipulate" the penis of a patient with a long-term erection. To make the situation less awkward, he whistles a song, and the patient joins him. A (woman) nurse hears them, opens the curtain, and is left speechless.
186	* NoOneCouldSurviveThat:
187	** Said almost word by word by Terry Foster, in regards to a man who had a ruptured carotid and sprayed blood up to two feet away. He even abandons his schedule to comfort the man's wife, only to be told that the man has unexpectedly recovered.
188	** Two teenage girls were impaled with the same pole at a car accident, one through the chest, the other in the leg. During surgery, it was discovered that the pole had just missed the first girl's heart and gone through the part of the lung that was less likely to kill her.
189	** A jogger was hit by a falling branch, which unbelievably impalled him from one side of the neck to the other. The doctor could not believe the man was not just alive, but also woke and capable of speech.
190	* ObstructiveBureaucrat: Non-ER doctors don't like ER doctors stepping on their territory or requesting unusual practices from them.
191	** The chief of the maternity ward who was annoyed about an ER doctor delivering three babies in a row at the ER.
192	** The chief gastroenterologist who refused to approve the removal of an amputated finger from a live dog, even though a gastroenterologist had already agreed to do it... [[EvenEvilHasStandards until she was told]] that they'd have to ShootTheDog otherwise.
193	* OhCrap: A common trope. Usually when a patient [[FromBadToWorse suddenly gets a lot worse]], they flatline, or the ER suddenly gets swamped.
194	* OlderThanTheyLook: Dr. Jessica Mason, from "Don't Touch Me!", has this problem. She's a full-fledged doctor in her 20s-30s, but most people assume she is much younger. She has actually been accused of being 12-13, and many patients assume she is either a nurse or intern. Dr. Mason can, in fact, be a DeadpanSnarker to those who make comments.
195	* OneWordTitle: "Blackout", about a doctor and a patient who blacked out.
196	* OpenHeartDentistry: Recurring trope on the show as sometimes a patient is so critical that the ER doctors have to perform surgery right then and there.
197	** One episode featured a med student, with a background in biochemistry and pharmacology, who ended up delivering a baby- or rather, ''watching'' in shock while a nurse delivered the baby. A family with the mother in labor walked into the wrong section of the hospital, where the med student was, and the instructor ordered him to help the woman. He had been a resident for 4 days, and didn't even know where the emergency room was.
198	** The ER crash team once had to perform a 'splash and slash', meaning they had zero time to do any sort of preparations, save for splashing antiseptic onto the patient and cutting them open.
199	** Another case saw an example of Open Heart Construction. A guy had stepped in concrete, but by the time he got to the ER it had hardened completely. The doctor had to saw through it in the ER.
200	** In an ER during the worst of the Iraq War, the doctors got swamped with casualties. At one point they had to get an E-2 administrator (basically a secretary with a military rank) to keep pressure on a wound.
201	** In an inversion, a man brought his beagle who was not breathing and had open wounds to the ER as it was the closest medical facility. The man was so distraught the doctors improvised, and saved the day.
202	** A patient's face was mangled from a dog bite, but there were no on-call plastic surgeons to reconstruct her face, so the ER doctor called on an old colleague. Unfortunately the colleague was tied up in surgery, so the doctor decided to do most of it himself, leaving just the lip for the colleague to do when he arrived. Then the colleague got stuck in traffic, so the doctor did that part himself too, including repairing a severed facial muscle. In spite of having sore arms ''and'' a sore back from doing photography the day before, he did such a good job on both procedures that the colleague was amazed, and the patient healed completely, with almost no trace of her horrific injury.
203	** A more literal example than most: When a stabbing victim flatlined before the surgeon could arrive, an ER doctor had to perform a thoracotomy (open-heart surgery) to diagnose and treat a case of cardiac tamponade (in which the sac around the heart fills with fluid and starts putting too much pressure on the heart). She also improvised a makeshift solution to stem the bleeding, which kept her alive long enough for the surgeon to arrive. After surgery, the patient made a full recovery.
204	* OutWithABang: Nearly happened to a patient in "Pipe in Head"; a woman with an undiagnosed bleeding disorder almost died after losing her virginity on her wedding night, because her newly broken hymen wouldn't stop bleeding.
205	* PlayingSick: Sometimes the patients are faking it, oftentimes to get narcotics, or avoid something unpleasant.
206	** One "patient" faked unconsciousness to escape an argument with his wife, diverting time, personnel, and resources from other patients in the emergency department. (For the record, the argument with his wife was because he cheated on her at a bachelor party, so no sympathy there either.) His wife was also worried sick, and wracked with guilt thinking she had caused his condition somehow by yelling at him. Not only that, but the paramedics and staff treating him wasted time and energy taking precautionary measures against what they assumed to be a contagious rash — which turned out to be lipstick from whoever he was cheating with. (And it's implied to have been multiple people, as the doctor notices there is more than one colour of lipstick.) Both the doctor and the wife are completely pissed when they realize he was faking, and the doctor does not hold back in upbraiding him for it.
207	** A young armed forces veteran had a bad case of MunchausenSyndrome; he made it appear that he has razor blades in his stomach by taping the blades to his dog tags, and then putting the dog tags under his back when he gets X-rayed. Meanwhile, between tests, he regales the staff and fellow patients with stories from his time in the forces, reveling in the attention and sympathy. When his deception is discovered, he tries to use his veteran status to guilt the staff for calling him out. The only possible sympathy here is for the fact that he has an untreated mental disorder.
208	** Another case is a drug-seeking patient who fakes abdominal pain to get morphine. When the doctor refuses to administer more medication after finding nothing wrong, she yells at him and threatens to report him before storming out. ([[spoiler:The doctor pulls a fast one on her by phoning his identical twin, who works at the hospital she said she would head to next.]]) Again, the only possible source of sympathy here is that the patient obviously has an addiction.
209	** One patient complains of paralysis and intense pain in his legs. All tests come back normal, and he insists he needs strong pain medication, so the doctor suspects he's faking in order to get drugs. Despite the patient's impressive acting — not responding to even the most painful stimuli the doctor can muster — the doctor decides to discharge him (in a wheelchair). Eventually, they spot the patient on security cameras as he gets out of the wheelchair and steals drugs from a cabinet. (Ironically, he sustains an actual leg injury when he gets tackled by security guards.)
210	** A British patient on holiday has a dislocated shoulder and the attending physician's attempts to put it back in place only makes the patient scream in pain. The patient claims to have a brother who is an anesthesiologist back home, said brother later calls the hospital and recommends a certain pain reliever. This helps for awhile. The attending physician tries to have the patient admitted to orthopedics but the orthopedic surgeon refuses. The patient then requests a morphine drip, but is told that this is available in orthopedics, not in the ER. A few minutes later, a nurse relays a message to the attending physician: the orthopedic surgeon has changed his mind and even apologized for being rude earlier. The patient gets transferred to orthopedics. The ER staff was practically celebrating finally being rid of him when the orthopedic surgeon storms in, furious that their patient was admitted! ER staff realizes that the patient had often been on his cell phone; he had been calling the hospital's operator, pretending to be his brother and the orthopedic surgeon. He's wheeled back to the ER, where his phone is taken away and the staff finds a number for "Mom". They call her, and she tells them to not give her son any more painkillers. They also find out that the patient [[FakeBrit is really from St. Louis]]! And the shoulder? He's been doing this for so long that he can pop the shoulder out and in at will.
211	* PreciousPuppy: "Missing: 1 Finger" has one who becomes the center of the episode when she eats her owner's amputated finger.
212	** And then "ER Blues" has Earl, a little chihuahua who winds up being the ChekhovsGun when it's him pushing on his owner's stomach that caused her bowel to rupture. He's seen constantly in the arms of the GentleGiant security guard throughout the episode and his PuppyDogEyes are on full display.
213	* PuppyDogEyes: [[ExploitedTrope Exploited]] successfully and literally by the owner of a dog who ate the amputated finger of her boyfriend, a pianist. She puts the dog on the man's lap and dares him to look it in the eyes before telling the doctors to ShootTheDog so they can retrieve the finger. The man is moved and tells the hospital to retrieve the finger non-lethally, even though it is much more difficult and every second was closer to the finger being damaged irreversibly by the little dog's gastric acid.
214	* QuestioningTitle: "Who Shot Who?" Several people are brought with bullet wounds to the ER, and the Police arrives later because they believe one robbed a liquor shop. The CCTV reveals that the robber is [[spoiler:the one guy the doctor trusted the most and who almost used her sympathy to get away with it, while the others are unrelated to the robbery]].
215	* ARareSentence: In one episode, the ER team called the local Haitian culture society to see if they could get any help with treating a patient that believed there was a demon in her liver.
216	--> Nurse:.... They're transferring me to their Liver Demon Expert.
217	* RightThroughHisPants: Averted. If a patient was naked in real life, they are also naked in the recreation, but the naughty bits are blurred.
218	* RippedFromTheHeadlines: A couple of stories are pretty much enactments of actual news stories. The rampage of Damacio Ibarra Torres was told from the perspective of the medical staff treating their colleague who was shot in the head.
219	** Another one was them treating a boy who was internally decapitated, which destroyed five of the spinal disks in his neck. After he somehow managed to recover, it then cut to news footage of his junior high graduation.
220	* RuleOfThree: The segment "Don't Push It!" An ER doctor finds herself delivering three babies in quick succession (in a car at the parking lot; from a teenager at the ER who insists she is not pregnant; and in the elevator during a power outake), to the irritation of the PrinciplesZealot doctor in charge of the maternity ward.
221	* RunningGag: In the high-heeled-shoe-puncture case, the doctor's attempts to explain what a spleen is for keep getting interrupted at exactly the same point. She eventually gets fed up and tells the newest interrupter to wait so she can ''finally'' finish.
222	* SadClown: A full house is poisoned in "Birthday Party Gone Bad", party clown included. By the time he's wheeled into the ER vomiting, [[MakesSenseInContext he has no will to make laughs]].
223	* ScrewTheRulesIHaveConnections:
224	** The donor's wife who felt dizzy and turned out to be high.
225	** One patient was the wife of a senior doctor, who tried to pressure the brand new attending physician to send her straight to surgery based on his unconfirmed diagnosis. (The ER doctor stood his ground, and discovered that she didn't need surgery after all.)
226	* ScrewTheRulesIHaveMoney: A guy with a vibrator in his rectum bribes the hospital to not leave a record of his visit.
227	* ScrewTheRulesImDoingWhatsRight: A few times:
228	** One doctor couldn't treat his patient without breaking hospital protocol. His superiors were not happy when he went ahead and broke it, and he was made to answer for his actions. His response was that he would have done the same for any of the people enforcing the policy.
229	** The ''entire staff'' joins in on this trope when the stickler charge nurse refuses to let a car crash victim's injured dog - the former military-service dog of the victim's husband, who'd recently died in Afghanistan - be treated for a collapsed lung. Not only do the [=EMT=]s hide the animal in their ambulance so the charge nurse won't see it, but the X-ray techs sneak their gear out to the ambulance bay to image its chest, and a whole crowd of nurses shield the gurney from her sight when they bring the dog inside for a chest-tube, keeping it alive until a vet can finally arrive.
230	* TheScrooge: One Mr. Morrow keeps refusing treatment, claiming he is healthy and that doctors are lying to take his money. Mr. Morrow also has [[MajorInjuryUnderreaction a giant knife sticking out of his back]]. The hospital board is asked to intervene, but since they have no previous diagnosis of insanity, and Morrow is not unconscious, the doctor is told that he is legally obliged to allow him to leave if he doesn't want treatment. Luckily, Morrow collapses on the parking lot and was brought back into the hospital and operated on before he dies.
231	* SelfFulfillingProphecy: In "Short-Circuited Heart", a patient had created so much isometric muscle contraction by trying to squeeze out a "liver demon" that she believed she'd been cursed with, that she'd caused her muscles to break down and flood her kidneys with toxins. In trying to solve a problem that only existed in her head, she'd given herself kidney failure.
232	* ShootTheDog: A literal example is proposed (and [[{{Pun}} shot down]]) when a dog swallows the amputated finger of a man. The easiest way to do it is by killing the dog, but they cannot bring themselves to do it. Luckily they manage to get the finger out safely by sedating her and using an endoscope to get the finger out in time for the hand surgeon to reattach.
233	* ShotToTheHeart: In "Stabbed in the Heart", the eponymous patient's heart stops in Dr. Andy Brown's hands. When cardiac massage alone doesn't do the trick, he asks for a mg of epinephrine, and injects it directly into the patient's heart. It's implied he does it two or three times in total.
234	* SkewedPriorities: One episode featured the story of an older White woman with general malaise refusing to be attended to by a younger Black female doctor. Throughout the episode, in spite of the patient rebuffing her, she and her colleagues were still able to get enough information to eventually diagnose the woman with cancer. While the end of the segment, unfortunately, still had the woman hold onto her views, the doctor's competence and compassion was able to tear down some of her defense to the point of not only thanking her for treating her, but she even admitted to being the way she is because of her father's influence.
235	* SouthernFriedGenius: Dr. Ruthie Crider, who has appeared several times on the show, is straight out of rural Georgia and sounds like it. She's also an ''excellent'' doctor.
236	* SpotTheImposter: Two men become gravely injured in a car accident, their faces unrecognizable. One's the car owner and the other a carjacker and suspected attempted murderer, but there is no way to tell.
237	* SurprisinglyHappyEnding: While stories on this show generally end with the patients pulling through, occasionally there patient leaves with additional cause to be cheerful, such as the accidentally-gunshot bride who (thanks to standard blood tests) got to tell her fiancé they were expecting.
238	* TerrifiedOfGerms: The young man and his father in the segment "Don't Touch Me!"
239	* UnluckilyLucky: Many of the patients go through horrific accidents or illnesses, to be sure, but oftentimes they are saved by luck you couldn't buy with all the money in the world.
240	* UnwantedAssistance: The Asian mother in "Ice Cold Mom" has to be sent on a SnipeHunt because she keeps trying to "help" the nurse by yelling a heavily accented, barely coherent speech about how she found her youngest son unconscious from drugs. It turns out that the boy never took drugs; he has a ruptured spleen, and his mother is projecting the time she found her other son dead from an overdose.
241	* ValentinesDayEpisode: The segment "Twist and Shout" stars Drs. Suzanne and Mark Felt, who are married and work at the same ER. Their patients are a woman who got her hand stuck in a meat grinder while trying to retrieve her wedding ring, and a boy who had [[GroinAttack testicular torsion]] while riding with his girlfriend.
242	* WackyFratboyHijinx: One episode has a fratboy who had a stuffed deer head stuck on his own head during hazing. And after removing it, the doctor sees ''[[HereWeGoAgain another]]'' fraternity walking in with one of their members stuck in a toilet.
243	* WeaksauceWeakness:
244	** One patient almost died after being bitten by a young child. He was on immunosuppressant drugs and his body couldn't fight off the bacteria, so he went into septic shock.
245	** Another patient with a lifelong phobia of bugs crawling inside his body became paralyzed with fear when he woke up one morning with a bug inside his ear. As the narrating nurse puts it, this guy had his worst nightmare come to life.
246	* WolfInSheepsClothing: Averted in one episode. A man with hemorrhoids and heart problems was coming in with frequent bouts of bradycardia while his wife was with him. His wife is unbelievably nice to both her husband and the staff. The workers start thinking she might be this trope and is poisoning her husband. They were half right. During one his bradycardia bouts, one doctor asks the wife what happened and she explains that she was just giving him his hemorrhoid cream. The doctor looks at the bottle, and discovers that the bottle was his heart medication, nitroglycerine, which expands blood vessels, and causes blood to gather in the heart. So, while the wife was the one making her husband sick, it was by accident, and her kindness was genuine all along.
247	* TheWonka: Some of the doctors, mainly as a way to get through the day.
248	** Doctor Christopher Michos made a habit of getting rather eccentric-patterned scrubs.
249	** Sean Bush, with his unkempt beard and stringy ponytail, looks like a 30-something hipster yet is one of the best venom experts and doctors in the world.
250	** Dr. Joy Slade wears expensive suede high heels in the emergency department. She can walk and even run just fine in them; though they do require double booties when it's time to gown up.
251	* WhyDidItHaveToBeSnakes:
252	** A doctor with a bug phobia has to retrieve a bug from a woman's ear canal.
253	** Another intern with a parasite phobia has to treat all in a row: a woman with fly larvae under her toenail, a baby with a bad case of pin-worms, and a little girl with a bug deep inside her nose.
254	* YourCostumeNeedsWork: On Halloween, a guy walked in with an axe embedded in his head, complaining of a headache. The doctors, accustomed to fake injuries on Halloween, laughed and put him in another room. When one of the doctors played along and "inspected" the wound, but it was '''real blood'' on his hand...
255	* YourHeadASplode: Way too often with head trauma. Orthopedic and neurosurgeons try to piece it back together.
256	** One woman was saved by this! She took two point blank shots to the head, thankfully to only one hemisphere of her brain. What kills a lot of head trauma patients is that the brain starts to swell against the cranium, which results in fatal hemorrhaging. The fact that her skin was the only thing holding her heavily fractured skull together is what ended up saving her life, as it gave her brain room to swell without too much damage.

Context Series / UntoldStoriesOfTheER