It has finally warmed up. I've switched my toques for ball caps, put my sweaters away in a box in the back of my closet, and brought out my Crocs. Walking by the North gate, coffee in hand, the warm weather goes to my head, and I start skipping.

And I trip.

I stub my toe on an uneven piece of sidewalk where the roots of a nearby tree are pushing up from the ground. I go down spilling my coffee across the sidewalk.

It hurts like shit, and my stubbed toe is gushing blood– way more blood than I am comfortable writing about.

I look around for a hospital, but I know the closest is a 10-minute walk away. There are no pharmacies either, not even a tissue and bandage store. They are never about when you need them.

But there is a blood donation clinic. On the top of the building right in front of me. I take the elevator up to the fourth floor, where the clinic is. Somehow I get blood on the buttons.

There is a woman in a lab coat sitting at a desk, a couple of relaxing looking 'donation chairs', and a few less comfortable looking waiting chairs.

"I'd like to donate some blood," I say. Sitting down in one of the waiting chairs, I start to catch the blood that is pouring out of my toe into the empty coffee cup that I am still holding. "Do you have anything better for collecting it?"

The woman jumps up, grabbing a towel as she does, and comes towards me.

"Oh," I say, gesturing at the towel, "I was thinking something more like a beaker, or one of those plastic bags with a tube sticking out of it."

Not to be distracted by questions, she takes the towel and wraps it quickly around my foot. "Holding," she instructs me, in English.

I came in talking about donating blood, but she seems to have seen through my subterfuge. She grabs a couple of things and cleans and dresses the wound, wrapping it in gauze and tape.

I thank her, and stand up, shaking blood out of my Croc into the discarded towel before steeping back into it.

"Now what about that blood?" she asks.

I give about a half a litre, and get a cookie.

Leaving, as I get off the elavator, another man gets on with pants ripped a the knee, and blood flowing from his nose.

Maybe there is a reason they don't fix the sidewalk.