In a crisis situation, the bold letters designating a hospital’s emergency room entrance can be consoling.

Inside, one knows there will be doctors and nurses standing by to deal with any trauma, accident or illness. At Merit Health River Region Medical Center, Dr. Markus B. Stanley serves as the ER Medical Director and has since 2017.

“I love working in emergency medicine because it’s always new and different, every day,” Stanley said. “There may be anything from psychiatric patients hallucinating, to women with pregnancy complications or miscarrying.”

There are also those who come in, he said, with “broken bones; lacerations; gunshot wounds; drug overdoses; motor vehicle crashes; industrial accidents; assaults of all kinds and strokes and heart attacks. We pretty much see it all.”

And when seconds count, it takes everyone doing their job, Stanley said.

“It’s really a team effort,” he said, from the physicians and nurses to ambulance crews. Those working as emergency room technicians are also essential, he said, as well as x-ray and CT technicians and respiratory therapists.

“Everyone has a role and knows it and we roll because our goal is to be fast, efficient and save that patient’s life, or their physical or mental functions,” Stanley said. “When someone is having the worst day of their life or their loved one, our job is to try and make it not be the last day of their life.”

And in doing so, “We leave everything on the trauma or cardiac room floors, giving literally everything we have,” he said.

But sometimes it’s still not enough.

“Those are the bad days,” he said, but then there are the good days when a life is saved.

“Some days, you go home floating on air because we did something that really made a difference,” Stanley said. And making a difference is what is most rewarding about his job.

“We make a difference to someone pretty much every day. Making a little kid who has to have stitches laugh, reassuring a parent that their baby is going to be OK, keeping someone alive, catching a diagnosis that makes a difference between someone losing the use of a limb, things like that,” Stanley said. “That makes you feel great.”

Working in the ER is unlike working in other departments of the hospital, Stanley said, and “Even after all these years, there are surprises. Some funny, some sad, some strange, but it’s never very boring.”