I was doing a podcast interview recently when the conversation took a turn I completely wasn’t expecting.

The host and I were talking about the brilliant writing and the heavy emotional weight we carried through those eleven television seasons.

He adjusted his microphone and asked a surprisingly specific question.

He wanted to know about the physical reality of filming those tense operating room scenes.

How did we make the surgeries look so believable on a 1970s television budget?

I started laughing immediately, because my mind instantly flew back to the sweltering heat of Stage 9 at 20th Century Fox.

What the audience at home never realized was how far our prop department went for medical accuracy.

To make the surgical cavities look realistic, our prop master would drive to a local butcher shop every single morning.

He would buy real cow livers and kidneys, and pack them inside the fake rubber torsos of the actors playing the wounded soldiers.

Keep in mind, we were filming in Southern California.

The massive studio lights hanging above the operating tables were essentially giant heat lamps.

It was easily over a hundred degrees on that soundstage, and we were wrapped in heavy surgical gowns and thick cotton masks.

After four hours under those lights, the real butcher meat would literally start to cook.

The smell in that room was completely indescribable and absolutely horrific.

You were practically gagging before the director even called action.

On this particular day, we were filming a deeply serious, rapid-fire triage scene.

Alan Alda and I were working side-by-side, barking out complex medical jargon as fast as we could.

The script called for my character to extract a damaged piece of tissue with metal forceps and toss it into a bucket at the foot of the table.

The camera was pushing in for a very tight, dramatic close-up.

The tension on the set was completely pin-drop quiet.

I reached into the cavity, clamped my forceps onto a particularly slippery piece of warm cow liver, and pulled it out.

I swung my hand toward the stainless steel bucket, entirely focused on nailing the take.

And that’s when it happened.

Instead of dropping neatly into the bucket, the liver slipped from the grip of my metal forceps.

It hit the edge of the stainless steel rim with a loud, ringing sound.

Because the meat had been sitting under the hot lights for hours, it had become strangely firm and rubbery.

It didn’t just fall to the floor.

It ricocheted off the bucket, flew back through the air, and landed with a wet, heavy slap directly on the bare chest of the extra playing our unconscious patient.

The extra, who had been lying perfectly still and pretending to be deeply comatose for three hours, let out a completely unscripted, muffled scream.

He frantically opened his eyes and swatted at this hot, foul-smelling piece of meat resting on his collarbone.

He smacked it mid-air, and the liver went skittering across the slick linoleum floor like a gruesome, slippery hockey puck.

Alan Alda watched this rogue piece of butcher meat slide right past his muddy army boots.

I could see Alan fighting with every ounce of his professional training to stay in character.

He looked up at me, his eyes wide as saucers above his white surgical mask, and just let out this aggressive, high-pitched wheeze.

Loretta Swit, who was standing across the operating table holding a clamp, took one look at the flying liver and shrieked.

She instinctively jumped backward, crashing into a metal tray of sterilized surgical instruments and knocking them all crashing to the ground.

The entire illusion of the tragic, intense war zone instantly shattered into pieces.

I was laughing so hard my knees actually buckled.

I couldn’t catch my breath, and my surgical mask was sucking in and out against my mouth like a canvas bellows.

Gene Reynolds, our brilliant director, yelled out from the darkness behind the heavy studio cameras.

He marched out from his canvas chair to see what had just completely ruined his perfect, highly dramatic take.

When he walked onto the set, he saw the extra sitting up in a total panic, wiping fake blood off his chest.

He saw Loretta clutching her stomach, completely bent over in hysterics.

And he saw our poor prop master sliding across the slick floor, trying to chase down a piece of cooked cow liver with a pair of long wooden tongs.

Gene didn’t even bother yelling at us.

He just put his hands on his hips, looked up at the ceiling, and started laughing so hard tears formed in his eyes.

The real problem was that we still had to finish the scene.

They cleaned up the linoleum floor, reset the medical instruments, and gave us five minutes to compose ourselves.

But the comedy had already infected the room, and once the seal is broken on a set like that, it is nearly impossible to get it back.

Take two started smoothly enough.

I reached into the torso and grabbed a fresh piece of meat with the forceps.

But the very second the metal clicked together, Alan made a tiny, suffocated squeaking noise in the back of his throat.

That was all it took.

Take two was ruined instantly.

We tried for a third take, but Loretta couldn’t even look in the direction of the metal bucket without her shoulders violently shaking.

By take four, the main camera operator’s shoulders were heaving.

You could physically see the camera lens bouncing up and down on the video monitor because the crew couldn’t stop chuckling behind the equipment.

It took us over an hour and a half to film a simple ten-second insert shot.

Every time I moved my hand with the forceps, everyone at the table flinched simultaneously, as if I was about to throw a live grenade into the room.

That ridiculous moment became a legendary running joke for the rest of the series.

Whenever a scene was feeling far too heavy, or the sheer exhaustion of a fourteen-hour workday was setting in, someone from the crew would yell across the soundstage.

“Watch out for the flying liver!”

It was the perfect, chaotic pressure valve that we all desperately needed.

When you are dealing with such profound tragedy and emotional weight on television every day, sometimes your brain just needs something wonderfully stupid to help you survive it.

It is funny how a simple mistake with a piece of prop meat can become one of the most cherished memories of your entire career.

Have you ever had a moment where you absolutely couldn’t stop laughing at the worst possible time?