There’s something about hospital Emergency Rooms that makes me want to laugh. Emergency Rooms are typically very serious places; the person next to you might have a gash from an accidental axe, another may be suffering silent faintness and the sirens of the ambulance outside heralds the arrival of an emergency that requires no triage nurse. And yet, there is a certain dark humour that permeates my mind as I sit and contemplate the fragility of the human existence. Mind you, I suppose if I was standing there with a ruptured aorta I probably wouldn’t be practicing a soliloquy on our serious lives, or doing stand-up comedy for that matter. I’m sure the other patients didn’t care for my flippant laughter as the nurse got stuck on my name. Maybe they thought I was deliriously hysterical.

Meanwhile, the large bandage covering the cheerfully crimson gash above my knee was starting to fill with blood, which I observed to my friends Marc and Diana, was starting to look like a game of tetris. Thankfully there was a some white left on the top of the bandage indicating that the game wasn’t quite over. Then there was the grin and chuckle of the triage nurse as she asked “so how many beer had you had when you fell into the hole chasing your friend here?” Or the equally cheering conversation later with a nurse on the possibility of swimmer’s itch from Half Moon Lake Resort where we had been having our “sloshball” tourney in honour of Rob K and Adrienne’s impending nuptials. Thankfully I hadn’t swum in the lake though the several failures at being upright in the nearby sulphurous swamp probably increased my chances for acquiring any number of cosy leeches, assorted bugs and numerous itches.

A couple hours later as the doctor sewed the rudely parted lips of my skin together, he was apologizing profusely for his lateness in seeing me. He had been saving the life of a terminally ill patient next door. I laughed. I wasn’t in any mortal agony or danger. Though, I would have loved a beer at that point… “Hmm, did that hurt, I don’t think I quite iced that area…”