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 hospital is revealed in a moving and personal notebook by William Bonadio, M.D. It recounts the lessons a doctor learns beyond medicine, beyond the textbooks, revealing insights into the human condition at both 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 supreme power of a mother's instinct to advocate for her handicapped child, and observe the supreme wisdom of an immigrant father who intuitively senses things the doctors cannot. Finally, with Julia's mother, we share in the nobility of a parent's unending search to find meaning in tragedy.