Grace Glassman took the mic. A 56-year-old emergency physician, she launched into a story of the day she was preparing to do a rare and gruesome procedure called a lateral canthotomy.

The patient was an intoxicated male who had tried to hang himself with his bedsheets the previous night. Now he had a bloody mass behind his eyeball. “If people are squeamish, I suggest you get your AirPods out, put them in and you turn up your music now,” Glassman said. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”

Nine doctors were gathered at a Brooklyn Public Library branch in Fort Greene on a Saturday night to tell true stories at an event called Airway. All work in Brooklyn at Maimonides Health, most of them in the hospital’s emergency room. They were taking the night off to try to talk honestly about the pride and occasional inadequacy they felt in their work. In concept, Airway is like the Moth — ordinary people telling everyday stories — but with all the vérité drama of HBO Max’s scripted E.R. show “The Pitt.”

Glassman continued. The lateral canthotomy — a cut, then a probe and snip under the skin at the outer corner of the eye — would save the patient’s vision. If done correctly, the eyeball would “not come, like, out out, like roll off the table,” she said, with a canny smile. It would merely relieve the pressure on the optic nerve by loosening the eyeball in its socket. The audience — doctors intermingled with members of the lay public — laughed uneasily.

This physician wanted to convey the mounting stress she felt to the 150 friends and strangers packed into the hot, bright room. An E.R. doctor for 20 years, she had taught the lateral canthotomy to residents by PowerPoint but had never performed one herself. With 90 minutes to spare until the patient lost sight in one eye, she prepped by watching YouTube videos. “I’m not a cowboy like a lot of my colleagues,” she admitted. “And I do not like these big, high stakes, bloody, messy, risky procedures.”