Christmas Eve, for Dr. Mary Brandt, will forever be associated with saving the life of a little girl who nearly died from a gunshot more than 25 years ago.

Teams were in the middle of changing shifts when a 6-year-old came to a Texas county hospital ER with massive gunshot wounds to her shoulder and chest. Her mother had been fatally shot by her boyfriend. When the girl tried to call 911, the man turned his shotgun on her.

After hours of surgery, Brandt saved the child. Since then, Brandt, now a pediatric surgeon at Texas Childrens Hospital in Houston, has operated on many more child shooting victims. All of us have some patients who we cant forget, Brandt said of the young girl. In terms of being able to not be sad about it, it took months and months. Im still probably a little sad about it.

Few people in the world are more familiar with gun violence than emergency room doctors and surgeons like Brandt. But until recently theyve largely kept quiet about their experiences on the front line of this public health crisis.

That changed in November after the American College of Physicians issued new guidelines on how doctors can help protect patients from gun violence and the National Rifle Association responded by telling physicians to stay in your lane .

In effect, the NRA wanted these doctors to shut up about an issue that touches their lives daily, leading to a record high of nearly 40,000 deaths in 2017, according to recent data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, and around twice as many injuries each year.

The NRA retort was enough to lead many physicians to break their silence. Under the banner of This is our lane, surgeons and other doctors thrust themselves into the gun debate, sharing photos from inside operating rooms and telling stories about the agony of treating an unending flow of shooting victims.

Medical organizations also doubled down, calling for additional gun violence research and further pushing measures like universal background checks , waiting periods to buy guns, safe storage initiatives and so-called red flag laws designed to keep firearms away from people who may be a danger to themselves or others.

Now, in a series of interviews with HuffPost, doctors are shedding additional light on the topic, painting a diverse portrait of a problem that afflicts communities in a variety of forms, including mass shootings, assaults, accidents, intimate partner violence and suicide.

Their accounts describe exhausting work that doctors have traditionally shouldered in private. Many doctors told HuffPost they feel its their moral duty to show the public the truth: Gun violence is ubiquitous in emergency rooms all over the country.

Exposing people to that reality could resonate in a way that general facts and figures about gun violence havent and show Americans that its necessary to begin taking steps to address the crisis, Brandt said.

Human beings dont just change their minds because of data.

When doctors see patients with gunshot wounds on a daily basis, its hard to keep track of how many theyve treated.

I wish I knew. Too many, said Dr. Adam Schechner, a trauma surgeon at the University of Maryland Prince Georges Hospital Center in Cheverly.

Schechner estimates hes tended to hundreds of shooting victims, the majority of them young men from Washington and the Maryland suburb of Prince Georges County. Schechner recalled a case in which a young man died of his injuries. When Schechner informed the patients mother, she broke down. The woman gathered herself long enough to explain that the son shed lost was the only family she had left. Her other son had been shot and killed a few years prior. She was alone.

That one really, really got to me, Schechner said.

Even when his patients survive, it can feel as if hes working against a tide that will ultimately erase his work, Schechner said. Many of the gunshot victims that come into the hospital have been shot before.

Its disheartening because most of the time it seems like they just dont care, [like] they dont seem to appreciate the second chance theyve been given, Schechner said. Thats really the hardest part of my job: working to save somebodys life and then having them not appreciate that life.

Last year, the hospital Schechner works at launched a program to help survivors whove been shot or stabbed multiple times , providing wraparound care and social services designed to target the root causes of violence. The evidence so far suggests its working.

The program is a critical step toward prevention, but its hardly a catchall solution to gun violence, Schechner said. The more shooting victims he treats, the more he realizes this issue affects him not just as a doctor but also as the father of young children, who he fears he could someday find on an operating table with a gunshot wound.

It makes my life outside the hospital that much sadder, because its something I wish I could do something about, but I feel helpless, Schechner said.

Even two decades as a trauma surgeon couldnt truly prepare Dr. John Fildes for the terror he encountered on Oct. 1, 2017.

Fildes began his shift at the University Medical Center in Las Vegas just minutes after the gunfire stopped at the Route 91 music festival, the scene of the deadliest mass shooting in modern U.S. history. There were already 35 people with gunshot wounds waiting in the trauma area, he said.

There was blood all over the floors and the gurneys, and there were patients that were holding pressure on their own wounds telling me to take care of the sicker patients, Fildes said. It was like a scene from hell.

Fildes and his colleagues scrambled to get the most severely injured patients into the operating room and worked to stabilize the others. Most of the team managed to work through the paralyzing horror of the moment, though a handful of staffers were so emotionally jarred that they had to be briefly pulled away to compose themselves, Fildes said.

Despite the circumstances, Fildes and the surgery department he chairs saved every one of the 104 patients connected to the shooting who arrived at the hospital alive.