dr. james mccarthy is part of the team trying to stabilize the child and save his leg.runs this emergency room and says it's like this almost every night. >> it gets busy enough it's standing room only. there are no extra seats, shuffling patients around to get them into the areas they need to be. there's the problem of too busy. you get busy enough that we become saturated and no longer have the capacity to continue to take care of everybody. that's a real risk in houston right now. >> houston has roughly 5 million people. it has just two level one trauma centers. that's the place you need to go when you're critically injured. most cities this size have five or six such trauma centers. the american college of surgeons says you should have one for every million in population. here, it's not even close. you have eight emergency bays like this one. it's not at all unusual to have them all full? >> there are many days if you don't get to be on a ventilator, everything else is managed in the hallway outside. >> why is this trauma center so overloaded? much of it can be blam