Hundreds of people slam through its doors every day: gun-shot cops, battered kids, drug addicts, and suicides, destitute drunks, homeless people, AIDS sufferers, and accident victims. It's a bizarre parade of humanity looking for help -- in the one place they know they can find it. Welcome to the frontline trenches of medicine: the emergency room of the legendary Bellevue Hospital. Here, an army of doctors and nurses faces the onslaught of young and old, rich and ragged, sick and dying. All day, all night. All year.This is their story -- an around-the-clock drama of the unexpected: a crane falling on a hapless pedestrian; a crazed executive wearing two-thirds of a three-piece suit; a pretty paralegal aide struggling with an on-the-job cocaine overdose; a trauma victim of an East River helicopter crash clinging to life. It's terrifying, tragic, triumphant ... and true. “A gripping, lively thought-provoking book.” - Booklist “Chilling…fascinating and profoundly disturbing.” - Library Journal “Gut-wrenching, heartwarming, and instructive about the exigencies of this branch of medicine as practiced at this legendary institution.” - Publishers Weekly Hundreds of people slam through its doors every day: gun-shot cops, battered kids, drug addicts, and suicides, destitute drunks, homeless people, AIDS sufferers, and accident victims. It's a bizarre parade of humanity looking for help -- in the one place they know they can find it. Welcome to the frontline trenches of medicine: the emergency room of the legendary Bellevue Hospital. Here, an army of doctors and nurses faces the onslaught of young and old, rich and ragged, sick and dying. All day, all night. All year.This is their story -- an around-the-clock drama of the unexpected: a crane falling on a hapless pedestrian; a crazed executive wearing two-thirds of a three-piece suit; a pretty paralegal aide struggling with an on-the-job cocaine overdose; a trauma victim of an East River helicopter crash clinging to life. It's terrifying, tragic, triumphant ... and true. Edward Ziegler is a former editor at Reader’s Digest. Emergency Doctor By Ziegler, Edward Perennial ISBN: 0060595027 Chapter One An Overturned Crane It was almost noon on a bright spring day when the thirty-five-ton crane began to unload steel rods from a flat-bed truck idling at curb side. The site was that of a projected forty-two-story luxury condominium on Third Avenue between Sixty-third and Sixty-fourth streets in Manhattan. As the extended arm of the machine began to lift a load of rods and swing them over toward the construction excavation, lunchtime pedestrians scurried uncomfortably along a sidewalk bordered by plywood barrier, behind which was the pit from which the building would rise. Two women brushed past a third. This third woman was virtually in the shadow of the machine as its loaded arm began to counterbalance the base of the crane, causing it to tip up on two of its giant wheels. For an instant, the machine wavered, angled oddly toward the excavation. The first two women sensed something amiss and rushed to get away. The third, Brigitte Gerney, was not so fortunate. She tried to retrace her steps toward Sixty-fourth Street. "Get out of the way! We're going over!" a voice close to her shouted. It was the twenty-nine-year-old construction worker who was at the controls of the heavy machine. Below him, the sidewalk which had been undermined by the excavation of the past few days began to cave in. Then, amid the splintering of wood and the screech of bending metal, the crane turned over, trapping Mrs. Gerney suddenly underneath and coming to rest upside down at the edge of the abyss. Only a thin course of lightly framed plywood resting atop an I-beam seemed to be keeping the crane from plunging with its victim some thirty feet into the construction pit below. "It was like an earthquake," Mrs. Gerney later recalled. "I remember my bag flying out of my hands. I heard the noise of all the bones cracking in my legs." For the forty-nine-year-old Manhattan mother of two, it was the beginning of a seemingly endless ordeal. Both of her legs were pinned at a point ten inches above the knees between an edge of the giant machine and the crumbled sidewalk. As the crane came to rest, her right leg seemed to be almost severed, her left severely crushed. "I felt the warm blood going out and I had the impression that my legs wer completely cut off," she would remember months later. After a moment of shocked disbelief, she cried out: "Get this off me!" Her cries set in motion one of the most intensely observed rescue attempts New York had experienced in years. * * * The fate of Mrs. Gerney would depend in some significant degree on a doctor who as yet had no awareness of her predicament. Some forty blocks downtown, at Bellevue Hospital, on First Avenue and Twenty-sixth Street, a phone rang in the crowded doctors' station just behind the triage* desk, at the principal entry into th