Two decades after publishing the memoir The Blood of Strangers, physician Frank Huyler delivers another dispatch from the emergency room—this time from the perspective of middle age. In these poignant portraits, Huyler reveals the gritty reality of medicine, introducing such unforgettable patients as an injured veteran back from Iraq, a young woman who had inserted a sewing needle into her heart, and a homeless Navajo artist whose sketches charm the nurses. Huyler is just as perceptive regarding his own life, and he memorably recounts the hail falling on the night his wife gave birth, and his drive through a snowstorm to see his father in a Colorado hospital.