Who here plans on dying?
I've never had a true near-death experience. Sure there've been times when it could have happened... the time the car 30 feet in front of my motorcycle got t-boned at an intersection or even the time I got acute appendicitis a couple days before I would have been on a 13-hour flight; but I've never really been in a situation where I was actually close do death. Other than circumstantial evidence from books and TV, I have no real reason to think that I'm actually going to die. That said, I probably will at some point.
So a few weeks ago, I'm minding my own business, recovering from the latest in a string of colds/viruses my toddler has brought home from daycare when I notice an odd rash on my face. Not that big a deal really and I probably would have let it go a couple more days had I not just started taking a new antibiotics from my doctor which listed 'facial rash' as a sign of a possible adverse reaction. So I call the doctor, he says "come in" and promptly diagnoses me with Shingles. I'd heard the term but had no idea what it was. The good/bad thing about the internet, though, is that you can fairly quickly access the worst possible scenario (along with photographs) of nearly any circumstance; so after a quick browse, I determined that a facial occurance of shingles (apparently rare for persons under 50, which I'm well under) can frequently lead to temporary/permanant blindness and/or hearing loss -- blindness being especially common when the outbreak is on the tip of your nose.
So I sit there in front of the computer, trying not to pick at the rash on the tip of my nose or between my temple and the corner of my eye or under my chin; trying to imagine what life would be like without vision. I suppose "not too fun" was the primary conclusion and of course "worse than death" sneaks into the picture every now and then. Anyway, a few days later it all started to clear up and at this point you wouldn't know it at all were I not spelling it out to you, but it left me thinking about life.
Nothing really bad has ever happend to me. Sure people around me have died, I've lost jobs, I've failed classes, I've missed out on opportunites, I even sat through Weekend at Bernies II but nothing bad has happened that wasn't overcomeable... but that winning streak has got to end at some point. It's a little scary.
And by the way, I don't actually think I'm going to die. It would be hard to prove and I'm pretty sure the "I told you so's" would be landing on deaf ears.
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