A real-life pediatric emergency room doctor reveals the trials, heartbreaks, and triumphs of his work. It's a place of intense human drama, life's highest hopes and deepest despairs. A place we rarely get to see through a doctor's eyes. But now the emergency room at a children's hospita is revealed in a moving and personal notembook by William Bondio, MD. It recounts the lessons a doctor learns beyond the textbooks, revealing insights into the human condition at its most vulnerable and courageous moments--from the patient who, after intense medical therapy, gives up the will to live, to the sick newborn baby who never would. We feel the power of a mother's instinct to advocate for her handicapped child, and observe the wisdom of an immigrant father who intuitively senses things the doctors cannot. Finally, with the mother of a young patient named Julia we share in the nobility of a parent's unending search to find meaning in tragedy.