By Dr. Billy Goldberg and Mark Leyner

We see a great deal of head trauma in the ER. Survival stories, however, are few and far between.

For every amazing tale of survival you hear about – a man is fine after being accidentally shot in the head with a nail gun or a boy completely recovers after a butter knife is lodged in his skull – most cases of head injury don’t have happy endings.

The recent tragedy of welterweight Oscar Diaz is typical. The 25-year-old boxer is in a coma after collapsing in the ring on July 16. According to news reports, there was no sign that anything was wrong with Diaz until he grabbed his head and cried out just before the 11th round. Doctors think he will survive after surgery for bleeding on the brain, but whether he’ll have a normal life is unclear.

When it comes to head trauma there’s a weird phenomenon we often see in the ER — nothing turns out like you'd expect.

By Linda Dahlstrom

Some things aren’t always black and white. Then again, sometimes they are – like the twin sons born July 11 to a German couple.

The first baby, Ryan, has light skin and blue eyes. His brother, Leo, is dark skinned with brown eyes.

"None of us could believe it," the maternity ward's head doctor, Birgit Weber, told one news source, "Both kids have definitely the same father."

Stephan Gerth is German and white. His wife, Florence Addo-Gerth, is from Ghana and has dark skin.

" It was “a real surprise,” Gerth told the German newspaper Die Welt, adding that the most important thing to him isn’t color, but that everyone is healthy.

The odds are one in a million, say doctors, but can happen with fraternal twins due the genetic soup in our backgrounds.

By Melissa Dahl

Does all that exertion on the elliptical machine make you nauseous? Have you ever been convinced that if you spend even one more minute on the treadmill, you will actually die? Maybe it’s not all in your head.

A few people are actually allergic to exercise, and in very rare cases, a sweaty workout could be enough to kill them. What an awesome excuse to skip the gym!

Exercise-induced anaphylaxis is a fairly rare condition which can cause hives, fainting, vomiting and difficulty breathing during a workout, and the symptoms can last up to four hours after it. In some cases, it can be triggered by certain foods eaten before exercise, like peanuts, shellfish, eggs or even, in two reported cases, celery. But this isn't just your average food allergy, an expert explains.

"These are people who will not have this reaction unless they exercise right after eating this food," says Dr. Jacqueline Eghrari-Sabet, an allergist in private practice in Montgomery Village, Md., and a spokeswoman for the American Academy of Allergy, Asthma and Immunology. "Eating shellfish and sitting there? Nothing. But eating shellfish and exercising? For these people, it's bad news."

By Mark Leyner and Dr. Billy Goldberg

No matter how careful we think we are, we’re all prone to doing some pretty stupid things to our bodies. Some of us take responsibility for our own actions. Others blame their defective thongs.

Remember Macrida Patterson? She’s the Los Angeles traffic cop who sued Victoria’s Secret for an eye injury that occurred when a heart-shaped metal fastener in her underwear snapped, popped into her eye and injured her cornea.

The case of the hazardous thong got us talking about the fact that people typically look for some excuse or someone else to blame when they get hurt. Nowhere is this more evident than in the emergency room.

Just this past week, Billy was working in the ER and he saw a classic example of a poor decision gone haywire. It was a busy Monday evening and the ER was filled with your usual assortment of injured, infirmed and intoxicated. Alcohol is usually involved in most of the ER’s most brilliantly dumb accidents. In fact, from 1992 through 2000, researchers found that there were about 68.6 emergency department visits related to alcohol, almost 8 percent of the total ER visits during that time period.

We have to assume that some intoxicant was involved in this particular case, but by the time Billy got involved, it was too late for questions. A middle-aged man had apparently needed to urinate and used a nearby plastic bottle. After inserting his penis in the hole, he found himself unable to extricate his now swollen member from the grasp of this plastic vise. It is unclear what attempts he made on his own, but by the time he arrived he was trapped and had been unable to relieve himself. After a hefty dose of morphine, two young residents and a junior attending physician unsuccessfully tried to free him from captivity. By the time Billy arrived, he was screaming in pain.

By Diane Mapes

We’ve all had that creepy feeling that something is crawling on our skin, scurrying across our scalp, scuttling around the base of our neck. Usually, it’s our imagination, but for a woman in Levittown, N.Y., that creepy feeling was all too real.

Nina Bradica, 45, was quarantined June 6 after she became infested with bird mites, tiny insect-like parasites that normally live on birds.

The mites entered Bradica’s home through a wild bird’s nest in her bathroom vent. The nearly-invisible bloodsuckers took over her bathroom and swarmed onto Bradica when she took a shower. Before long, her body was covered with red bumps and welts from their bites. The bugs crawled into her nose, her ears, her mouth and “other places,” according to her daughter.