Two South Florida health professionals will re-enact mysterious medical cases for Discovery Fit & Health channel’s “Untold Stories of the ER.”
The ninth season of the popular reality-based series will premiere Friday and show the kind of ear-bending stories only ER doctors get to see – like the patient who walked in with a snapping turtle clamped to his neck, or the man impaled by a chainsaw.
In “Blue Man High,” airing Aug. 22, Boca Raton‘s Dr. David Begleiter re-enacts the time when a patient showed up with skin an odd shade of blue.
“He almost looked like a Smurf,” Begleiter said. “It needed to be addressed quickly.”
Begleiter learned the man had ingested a recreational drug – a toxic dose of materials found in a cyanide antidote kit – starving his cells of oxygen and giving his blood the look and texture of chocolate syrup.
When approached by “Untold Stories,” Begleiter said he was happy to do the show.
“I loved every minute of it,” said Begleiter, whose wife, a Broward Health Medical Center pediatric ICU nurse, makes an appearance as an extra in the episode.
Later in the fall, nurse Maricar Cabral of Joe DiMaggio Children’s Hospital in Hollywood will re-enact the case of a female patient complaining of severe stomach cramps. Suspicions of a surprise pregnancy are discounted when the ER staff learns the true source of her pain: a tapeworm.
That episode does not yet have an air date.
Because of patient privacy laws, the show’s producers can’t reveal where the actual cases took place, only where the doctors currently practice.
On TV
What: “Untold Stories of the ER”
Airs: 9 p.m. Fridays on Discovery Fit & Health channel (check your cable channel guide, or go to )
