It was quite a week, last week was. And I’m not even referring to the dramatic end of the Olympics or the first (hopefully annual) “Time Is Muscle” extravaganza that featured a full house of generous people who raise a whole truckload of moola and kicked off a whole bunch of push for a Catheter Lab here. (Not that kind of catheter.) No, what I mean is, last week I came about THIS close to ending up in the hospital myself. Maybe I should explain.
So a whole bunch of us were scurrying around at The Krossing restaurant early in the day last Saturday, setting up and decorating and sound-checking and – I hate to say it, but I kind of made a fool of myself. So what else is new - you may say, but really, who falls UP the stairs? Well, Yours Truly apparently, on account I’ve done it twice in that very same venue. This time, however, it was pretty epic. So I was booting it up the half dozen or so stairs to where the booths are and I was carrying an armload of stuff and speaking of boots I was wearing my favorite Keen hikers which somehow caught on the carpet. Trouble was, I knew I was going down, and going down big, and I tried really hard not to. I tried to scamper to somehow “save” the fall but ended up flailing hysterically like a kid jumping off the old 10 meter diving board at the Rec. Center, knocking some tables and a couple of chairs flying, and launching my armload of stuff straight up into the air.
I finally crashed like a metric tonne of bricks, candles and cutlery, furniture and flowers raining down on top of me, the whole unfortunate episode sounding like a herd of buffalos hurtling into a large display of tin garden sheds at Home Depot.
For a split second every body part I own (and some I didn’t know I owned) felt like it had been soundly pummeled by a hockey stick or possibly a cricket bat, but then something else took over. No, it wasn’t the survival instinct, it was red-faced mortification. As people gasped and rushed over to see if I or any of the furniture had survived, I attempted to jump up as if this explosion of ineptitude had never happened. “Nothing to see here, folks – ha, ha! I’m fine! Everything’s…” I jauntily proclaimed as I lost my balance again and fell into yet another table. At least I didn’t knock that one down.
Here’s the thing – the first person there to help me up, the person who had been right behind me when I took my highly over-dramatized cacophonous tumble was a doctor. Did I mention the event was about improving health care resources and involved a whole bunch of doctors, nurses and health people, including one of the leading cardiologists who happened to be currently asking me if I was all right?
“Is there a doctor in the house?” I chuckled sheepishly, attempting some lame humor as I am so often unfortunately wont to do in situations like this. It all turned out fine, as Dr. N. didn’t even have to operate or anything, and I managed to pretend I wasn’t limping and I’m pretty sure I kept my groaning to a minimum as we picked up all the pieces of stuff that I had catapulted.
When the dust cleared though, there was one positive. I’m glad I fell up the stairs rather than down. Because if that had’ve happened Dr. N. would have had an awful lot of work to do.