It took me a while to get going today, but two hours into my medical exams, I finally got a room laughing out loud. No medication, no caffeine, no food, and sleep-deprived, yet I managed. I don’t know where I keep coming up with that “all my charm is from my medication” nonsense. It was a pretty solid joke, too.

I’m back in the waiting room, waiting for my next x-ray, and the longer I wait, the more my mind fills with junk. An older woman is next to me, maybe in her sixties, but she is full of life. In what reality would I envy her? When it was time for her imaging, she struggled a little to get up. I jumped up and handed her her cane. She laughed it off and went with the radiologist.

When she returned to the waiting area, she sat down, took out her phone, and called her friend. They reminisced about the old days, and she kept laughing out loud. She laughed with her whole body, even stomping her feet when something was worth more than a booming laugh.

She interrupted her friend to answer another call from her daughter. Her tone changed, but she kept the same intensity. She asked her daughter if she had eaten yet, then launched into a 15-minute conversation about their favorite fast-food restaurants.

I could hear both sides of the conversation because the phone was on speaker. Their words replaced the junk in my brain, fighting for valuable real estate. I wondered if I could ever get to that point, where I would be in a hospital waiting room, waiting to see what new disease was wrecking my body, unable to quickly stand up, yet still full of vigor and echoing laughter.

She must be twice my age, and we both spent four hours of our lives doing this exam, yet the four hours passed very differently for us. While her laugh filled the room, I was wondering what it would feel like to take a potato peeler to my skin, peeling it off layer by layer.