ConocoPhillips 10K - February 2006

[Sweder]

I just couldn't face the public this morning, opting for 4 miles of mindless hell on the hotel treadmill.
Serves me right. I clutched my bottle of water, mobile phone and pathalogical fear of heights for the journey to the gym - on the 23rd floor. The instrument of my sweaty torture was pressed against a large window affording stunning views of downtown.

I struggled manfully to put all thoughts of illogical accidents involving the running machine lurching through the glass as I frantically try to run back into the building, wildly treading air like Wile E Coyote, to the back of my addled, tequila-trashed mind.

The TV monitor attached to the machine offered respite, an old episode of ER playing silently. I like ER, the early series especially so. George Clooney, an impossible mop atop his famously handsome visage, was saving children’s' lives and broiling nurses hearts in equal number; Dr Green busied from table to table, his terminal cancer as yet undiagnosed. Elizabeth was talking to Doctor Romano, the bald nightmare doctor from hell who rubs everyone up the wrong way, at the roach-coach over a cup of undrinkable mud passing as coffee. Hmm. I pondered the likely date of the episode as I slogged along at 7.5 miles an hour, rivulets of alcohol-soaked perspiration running freely down my wobbling lard. I was by now completely at ease, all thoughts of height-related calamity safely banished in favour of this guessing game.

Romano still has both arms, so he hasn't had the accident yet.
For those (many) people who don't avidly follow this quality American hospital soap, Romano has two encounters with helicopters; the first severs his arm, leading to terrible bouts of depression and no small amount of bother in the OR. The second finished him off as, in the midst of a particularly far-fetched episode another whirlybird crashes into the hospital building, lands on the doomed medic in the parking lot and for good measure explodes in a bloom of aviation fuel. The staff only discover his fate when the remains of his prosthetic limb are recovered . . .

Thoughts of the first incident reminded me that Romano's arm was severed by the tail rota of the aircraft on the hospital roof, many floors above downtown Chicago . . .

. . . oh bugger :mad: