The Worst Six Hours of My Life

This past Saturday I participated in taking a lovely little exam known as the LSAT. For those of you who don't know, the LSAT is essentially the entrance exam to get into law school. Do well on your LSAT, then you go to a good law school and start stacking mad cash; do poorly on your LSAT, then you go to a horrible law school and end up being a pro bono environmental lawyer. The point being that a lot of my future was going to be determined by how well I did on a test when I would rather be sleeping and then watching college football.

Now the LSAT is made up of six 35 minute sections (only four of which are graded) and a 15 minute break in the middle. I'm not a math major or anything but I believe that adds up to three hours and 45 minutes. I was willing to accept 45 minutes to an hour for instructions putting me somewhere around four and a half hours for the whole test, which while an incredibly long amount of time, I was prepared to handle it. Somehow, in a turn of events inexplicable by either science or theology, this test last for over six hours. You heard me right, six. The actually time that it should have taken the test was almost doubled. It was unbearable. Excruciating. It may have been the worst six hours of my life. But this wasn't a title I was willing to give the LSAT lightly, and so I did some thinking. Here is what resulted:

The Top Four

4. 2003 American League Championship Series Game 7

As a diehard Red Sox fan it is difficult to even bring myself to recall this event. You may remember it as the Aaron Boone game. Red Sox vs Yankees, locked up into the 11th inning, Aaron Boone hits a walk off homer to send the Yanks to the World Series. This game probably only lasted about four and a half hours but the heartache which followed was more than enough to fill up the remaining 90 minutes. This would be much higher on the list if the Sox had not turned the 04 Yankees into the biggest choke artists in history.

3. The First Night After My Ankle Surgery, 2007

I had undergone surgery before, so I thought I would be alright with this ankle surgery, but that was not the case. Before I went under the knife, my doctor warned me that I was going to have some deep bone pain the next day, I had no idea what that meant but it sounded awful and I would soon find out that it was much worse than I ever could have imagined. Ironically having gone through the the previous surgery actually was a detriment because I had built up quite a tolerance to pain killers already. So rather than needing the standard percocet, vicadin or oxycotton to put me down, I needed a fistful of bear tranquilizers, which apparently are not readily available outside of vet clinics in Montana. But to make a long story short, my ankle hurt a lot until I was overcome by shear exhaustion until I fell asleep about 6-8 hours later. Moral of the story, if anyone tells you that you are going to have deep bone pain, you should probably leave immediately.

2. The LSAT. Nuff said.

1. The Stomach Flu Catastrophe of 2005

It was the night before a basketball trip my freshman year of college and I woke up around midnight with some rumbling in my tummy. I walked down the hall to our lovely community style bathrooms and found out that this rumbling in my tummy was actually some rather unpleasant diarhea. As it turns out, this bathroom break at midnight was the first of what would become a clockwork like need to purge my insides from one end or another every 20 minutes until about 6 in the morning. The worst part was that somehow, my body knew when I was in the bathroom and the 20 minute clock wouldn't start the countdown until I had left and gone back to bed. Needless to say this night was awful and to make matters worse, I was forced to stay home and not go on the basketball trip for obvious reasons. And that my friends, was the worst six hours of my life.