Nightmare Fuel / ER

General

• Some of the gore can be a little unsettling at times.

Season 1

• "Feb 5, '95". A boy, no more than 10 or 12, brings a pistol into the ER to attempt to finish off another 12 year old brought in earlier for a gunshot wound. He waves it around, pointing it at everyone while walking into the trauma room, where Benton tells him he is too late, and that his victim is already dead. He then points the gun at Benton before walking out without anyone trying to stop him. Additional fuel in that it was a drug deal gone bad and the victim had a Luger and a Tech-9 on him at the time.

Season 3

• Gant's death was extremely bone-chilling.
  • To wit, a patient is brought into the ER so mangled after having been run over by a train that his face is completely indistinguishable. Not until his pager goes off (Benton had asked Lydia to page Gant to call him to the trauma room) do they realize who it is, and they're all completely horrified.
    Maggie: (looking at the pager) Oh my God…
    Carter: What?
    Maggie: The patient! It's Gant!
    Carter: (looks in shock at the patient) …Dennis? Oh, sweet Jesus!
    Benton: Carter, put the tube in!
    Carter: Oh, GOD!
• Mark being beat up in the men's room. Completely unprovoked and unexpected and to make it worse, at one point, it seems to be over, only for for the attacker to strike again.

Season 4

• In "Ambush", the janitor talks to the camera crew about how he's used to cleaning up puke and waste but not blood and gore.
  That's the part you don't talk about when you go home and they ask you how your day was.
• "When the Bough Breaks" - While pursing a suspect, a police officer crashes into a schoolbus full of children. The ER is soon full of little kids on stretchers, covered in blood and crying in pain. One girl’s arm is almost completely severed, and a boy tragically dies after being thrown out the exit door.
  • During the same episode, while the ER is flooded with patients dealing with the aforementioned crisis, Carol Hathaway has to deal with a strung out crackhead who suddenly goes into labor with a child she didn't even know she had. Despite Carol's best efforts, desperately telling the mother not to push while she gets the necessary tools to help deliver the child, the mother does so anyway and gives birth to her child on the floor of the ER in one of the most graphic scenes of the series to this point. Carol vainly tries to resuscitate the baby, with the mother screaming at her all the while that it was Carol who dropped the child, but it's to no avail- the child is dead. What makes it even worse is that after the autopsy comes back it's revealed that the child already died in utero- two days prior. The child never even had a chance.
• Henry, Carter’s med student, unknowingly has an allergy to latex. During a trauma, he suddenly collapses and goes into anaphylactic shock. When Carter peels Henry’s gloves off, his hands are so swollen and red.
• For several episodes, a serial rapist is on the loose, targeting elderly women specifically. Several patients are brought in, beaten and raped, with one woman dying of her injuries. Although he’s eventually caught, his last victim suffers the worst - having the word ‘WHORE’ carved into her stomach before being strangled and pushed down a flight of stairs.
• Although it’s Played for Laughs, a man learns that he has had a guinea worm in leg for the past year. Even worse, the thing can only be removed 2 centimeters at a time or it’ll break.

Season 6

• Carter's stabbing at the end of "Be Still My Heart". As he falls to the floor, he (and the audience) sees Lucy in even worse condition. As horrifying as the attack on Carter was, whatever Lucy went through was even more so.
  • Can you imagine what was going through poor Lucy's mind? She's been lying there for who knows how long, desperately hoping someone will come to her aid, but when Carter walks in, she can't warn him or help him, and when she sees him collapse, she realizes her only chance of rescue is gone.
• At the beginning of the next episode, "All in the Family", a just-arrived Kerry finds bloody footprints leading out of the exam room where Lucy and Carter are. She opens the door and gives a horrified scream when she sees them, with Laura Innes selling her reaction so well you'd think she really come upon two stabbed people.
• Abby treats a mother of five who collapses and later assists the woman with getting an abortion before her husband finds out. The poor woman is absolutely exhausted with five young children and has resorted to starving herself in order to induce a miscarriage. The wife's terrified reaction to her husband is chilling, and he is at minimum controlling and emotionally abusive, blaming the wife for "taking on too much" and "wearing herself out" without offering any help to her. Abby is able to arrange for the wife to get an abortion, but the husband finds out shortly afterward and is irate. In the wife's final scene, after being left alone with the husband, she tells Abby, in a dissociated and loopy way, that they will start trying again for another child soon.
  • The entire thing is even more nightmare fuel upon that realization that the episode aired a year before Andrea Yates murdered her five young children.

Season 7

• Mark having a seizure during his brain surgery.
• The Season 7 finale, "Rampage," has 2 Paranoia Fuel doses — first the idea of abusers Going Postal on anyone helping victims, then the idea of medics coldly denying lifesaving measures (despite the Moment of Awesome of this time being Mark invoking Pay Evil unto Evil on the abuser).

Season 8

• There is a Season 8 episode with Abby alone in her bathrobe, when she hears a knock on the door, and she hears from the intercom that it's the pizza she ordered. She buzzes him in, and then opens the door to find out that it was the wife-hitter whose wife she had just saved. He tries to find out where his wife is, Abby doesn't tell him and he then leaves after a threat to call the police. She hears another knock on the door, and she stupidly unlocks the door (but leaves the chain lock on) and, it's still the hitter and he somehow forces himself inside and punches Abby until she falls unconscious.
• In the Season finale, "Lockdown" two kids come in with fever and rashes. The parents think it's chicken pox. Carter takes a look at the music drops, he runs into the lounge to check public health posters which confirm his worst fears...it could be Smallpox. For a medical professional this is an absolute nightmare scenario, an airborne, highly infectious, airborne disease with a mortality rate near 50%. And they were treated two weeks prior and were walking around in a major urban center while infectious? Fortunately it turns out NOT to be smallpox. But if it had been?

Season 9

• Romano's arm being chopped off by a helicopter rotor. It's depicted with brutal realism, including Romano going into shock and vomiting on his own face from the trauma.
• Kerry miscarrying her baby. It's heartbreaking, and absolute Nightmare Fuel for any woman who loses a wanted pregnancy — or wants children and fears losing one.

Season 10

• In "Touch and Go," Pratt is treating a 19 year-old boy with a disorder making his bones incredibly brittle. He goes into arrest and Pratt attempts to put in a tube against the orders of Carter and the advice of Neela. As Carter enters what follows is horrifying. The pressure Pratt applies to the kids neck is too much and we are given a shot of the patient's head leaning back slightly too far followed by a sickening snap, followed by silence as our cast realizes that his neck is broken and the patient is now paralyzed for life.

Season 11

• Abby suddenly getting abducted from the ER ambulance bay by gang members in "Skin".

Season 12

• In "Two Ships", one patient, Adrian, comes in apparently in asystole, but Pratt and Ray performing CPR is keeping him conscious. Apparently, the nerves that control the heart were irreparably damaged. This is industrial-grade And I Must Scream. Pratt, Ray and Sam keep Adrian alive long enough for his family to arrive. Eventually, Adrian grasps Pratt's arm with a Single Tear, a sign that he's ready for Pratt to stop doing compressions on him.

Season 13

• The entire confrontation between Abby, Luka, and Curtis Ames, a patient who suffered a stroke on Luka's watch and lost the use of his arm. After failing to sue him for malpractice, Ames proceeds to stalk Luka for weeks, even going so far as to file a restraining order against Luka, just to mess with him. Then he breaks into their apartment and holds Abby and baby Joe hostage until Luka arrives, forces Luka at gunpoint to crush his hand in a vice, then kills himself on a rooftop. All while Abby is left wondering if he'll survive.

Season 15

• Pratt in the trauma room bleeding out of a carotid tear. Basically he's puking up blood, and his neck is swelling from the pressure of the blood gushing out of the injury.

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