There's never a good time to be in Hull Royal Infirmary's accident and emergency department.
But I suppose late on a hot and sticky Friday night is probably the time you would want to avoid the most.
As it turned out, that's precisely when I ended up in A&E for five hours last week.
Before you ask, I wasn't the recipient of the medical attention being administered by the excellent staff.
But I was close enough to the action to once again wonder how those same staff manage to get through each shift without feeling the need to give a certain quota of patients and relatives a good slap.
The paramedic who was first on the scene was calmness personified.
The ambulance crew were efficient and good-humoured despite the prospect of another ten-hour shift without a break.
They told me their bosses had suggested crews should eat their pack-up lunches in their vehicles in between call-outs.
Yes, the same vehicles where blood, vomit and much worse has to be regularly swilled out.
In the high observation area of A&E, doctors and nurses with the patience of saints tried persuade one woman to stop her persistent moaning.
"Where does it hurt?" she was asked.
"Nooooooooooo," came the reply.
In an adjacent bed unit, another woman was forever trying to climb off her trolley.
No one knew exactly how many drugs she had taken because she was completely incoherent.
A friend who was doing her best to get her back on the trolley knew she had been out earlier to buy eight cans of lager to drown her sorrows after being dumped by her boyfriend.
The woman in question could have been anywhere between 35 and 55.
In a corridor, two more women were conducting a bizarre shouted conversation fuelled by gas and air.
"I just wanna die!" slurred one.
"No you dunt!" slurred the other.
"I wanna die, aaaargh!" slurred the first one.
"Shuddup! Ooooooh! This gas is lovely!" replied trolley number two.
"Leave me to die!"
"Aaaaargh!"
And so it went on and on.
As ever, when I finally left A&E to head home I was feeing much worse than I did when I went in and nothing was actually wrong with me.
The staff who work there deserve medals the size of dinner plates, or maybe just a decent lunch break.
