My family has been so illness- and injury-prone over the past few months that I'm tempted to look on eBay to see if I can trade them in for new models. Just when Caitlin seems to be on the mend from the mystery illness that has laid her low over the last 10 days or so, and Rebecca has finished physical therapy for the patella-femoral syndrome that afflicts both her knees, I get a panicked call from Rebecca that my husband had fallen down the basement steps and his ankle was swollen to the size of a grapefruit.

Off to the emergency room we trundled. The one thing that stuck in my mind after the visit? Was it the mind-deadeningly long wait to see the nurse, the registrar, the physician's assistant, the second nurse, the x-ray technician, the physician's assistant (again)? Was it the panoramic photo of about a dozen babies, presumably born at the hospital? Was it the fact that I found a parking space in the coveted front lot of the hospital, an event rarer than getting an honest, complete, cogent, coherent answer from a well-known politician in a nationally-televised news conference? No, it was not any of these things. Instead, it was the complete absence of the menacing signs that used to grace the walls of the ER admonishing visitors TO NOT USE THEIR CELL PHONES OR ELSE! The implication was that not only would use of your cellphone cause all pacemakers, monitors and other medical devices to stop working, but it might increase the terror alert level to red, curse you with the heartbreak of psoriasis, prevent your children from getting into a reputable college, and require you to listen to William Shatner sing "Lucy in the Sky with Diamonds" for all eternity.

So, the outcome is a chipped bone, not a through-the-bone fracture. Very painful, likely to cause a lot of discomfort for quite some time, requires icing and a trip to the orthopedist on Friday and serious painkillers (Vicodin). The one slightly tarnished silver lining? I don't have to go to DC on Friday for the interview I was stressing about earlier in the week.

TV: The Apprentice. High on my list of guilty pleasures, it's too bad they can't all be fired. They are a titanic snake pit of writhing, seething egos wriggling through the slime of their lies and deceptions (yeah, yeah, I know snakes aren't slimy, but I was struggling to put snakes, slugs and weasals all in one sentence). The two sleaziest of them all, destined to burn in the fires of business hell: Nick and Omarosa. Both are enough to make me ashamed to be a human or even a mammal. Just typing their names makes me feel filthy. At least I don't have to actually with any of them.