Somehow I found myself watching Untold Stories of the ER tonight on Discovery Health, a reenactment of real medical cases, often starring the actual doctors and sometimes the real patients and families. I'm becoming somewhat addicted to this channel. It promises quite a line up this month—bipolar disorders, eating disorders, strange addictions. I've always been fascinated by the workings of the human mind. And even more so by the mystery of how our thoughts and emotions connect with what's happening with our physical body.

But you wouldn't have had to share even an iota of my interest to be spellbound at the opening story of one of the episodes last night.

A man around mid-thirties with an Australian accent was wheeled in by medics with a GOLF CLUB THROUGH HIS HEAD. Think Vaudeville routine. Think, for those of us who have been around awhile, Steve Martin with the arrow going in one side and coming out the other. A golf club had been sawed off and pushed through the man's right ear on an angle up through his head to come out roughly in the middle of his crown. This man is talking away as if nothing's wrong. His only question for the medical professionals concerns his right ear. He can't hear out of it.

This charming act has been performed by the man's cousin. Why? From what I could gather (and I was going a bit back and forth from the TV to the kitchen where I was baking cookies for my son's 21st birthday and experimenting with "cookie icing that hardens" [google it] so I could spell out Happy 21st Birthday on the cookies) from the patient and the brief interview with the cousin (who was in another emergency cubicle with a police guard; if the golf-club man died, the crime would be homicide), there was a disagreement about point shaving.

What set off the patient most was that his cousin had ruined the man's FAVORITE DRIVER for the assault! The fact that it was through his head wasn't what riled him. What got him going again was, after the doctors sawed-off the two protruding pieces, seeing the driver and verifying the club his cousin had ruined was indeed his favorite.

I may not have to add this next info for most of you: the doctors assumed drugs were involved, and called for toxicology tests. The patient was definitely inebriated; the hospital staff could smell it. (And this was the perfect segue into the next show I watched, a documentary about methamphetamine, my second in as many months. When someone on meth gets angry, there is no stopping them, according to the documentaries. This crime would certainly fit that description.) I never heard the final results of the golf-clubbed patient's blood tests, but from the doctor's standpoint, that wasn't going to change their biggest concern—that when they took the driver shaft out, the man would bleed out, and "circle the drain" very quickly. Once this fellow was moved to the operating room, the observation room filled with "half the hospital." A once-in-a-lifetime medical situation. Would the patient lose memory? Motor abilities? Too much blood? His life?

Apparently, none of the above. The patient was wheeled to the exit, wound healed, chatting amiably as he had on admission, in a mere seven days. The only lasting effect: he will not hear out of that right ear again. Amazing?? As one of the doctors observed, that is why never assume a patient has no hope or chance, because the human body can be truly unbelievable.

I am thinking about the amazing human body these days because my 90-year-old mother, after a bad fall in the middle of the night where she broke her hip (her fourth break from a fall in the last two years), hours in pain before transport and then more hours in the emergency room, an overnight wait with fractured bones before she could get Saturday afternoon surgery to replace the hip, and several days of potentially critical complications, which meant lots of drugs, IVs, oxygen, and very little chance to even think about a couple hours of uninterrupted sleep, is getting ready to be released from rehab and go back to her group assisted living home. We don't know yet how well she'll be able to get around. We don't know what will stop a fall and fracture from happening again. Her dementia is advanced and she insists she never fell or had surgery. (Dementia functions incredibly well as a coping system.) We do know she is alert, in good spirits, in good medical health, and ready to go "home" wherever she imagines that is.

Sing the body amazing.