That's gonna leave a mark.

Every once in a while my wife gets hooked on a show that sucks me in as well. Last fall it was Mysteries at the Museum. More recently it is Untold Stories of the ER.

This show's been running a long time -- it debuted on TLC in 2004 -- and reruns have been on a couple of nights a week on Discovery Life. Untold Stories features reenactments of bizarre cases or situations in emergency medicine, with comments by the actual doctors, nurses, and often patients and others involved in the story. Sometimes the real people play themselves in the reenactments. So, the acting is not always top-notch. But the stories are always compelling. Often astounding.

For example, in just a few weeks of watching I've seen people with heads and necks impaled by giant metal hooks, fence posts, and poles, and one poor guy who fell off his roof and was impaled groin-first on a shovel. There was a fellow with a stiletto heel jammed in his chest. Someone with no fellow feeling might find these things hilarious, like Hell's own America's Funniest Home Videos, but I'm too busy squirming in my chair. The money saved on professional actors and complicated sets is used for realistic bloody reenactments. (The word "dramatization" is often posted on the screen so you know it's fake gore, but it looks real enough to me.)

There's usually a mystery element to the show, like "What's making this dude so sick?" or "Where can we find enough rattlesnake antivenin?" or "How are we gonna get this fence post out of this guy?" And I don't believe I've seen a complete fail yet, where the patient died, although they often don't come through unscathed. It's an impressive element to the show that they often get the real patients, sometimes with limbs or senses lost, come on to tell a bit from their end. The medical professionals relating their stories sometimes paint themselves the noble heroes, the lone voice of reason, but not often. You learn a good deal about what goes on from the other side of the curtain in the emergency room.

Maybe it's of extra interest to me since I had to spend time in the ER last February. Although the show demonstrates how emergencies can pile up and cause longer distress for patients who aren't in immediate danger, it doesn't really tell me why I had to wait so long for pain meds that my wife was about to try to score some heroin for me. However, I am a little more sensitive to the situation of healthcare providers in ERs (or EDs -- emergency departments, as they are more typically known). There's a fine line between crisis and chaos.

I certainly think all medical interns and students who haven't seen this show should check it out. It's a good example of how life is always trying to throw curve balls and change-ups at you, no matter how well prepared you think you are from school.