Still Lucky After All These Years

I’ve always considered myself to be a very lucky guy. I have a beautiful family who loves me, we live a comfortable lifestyle and I’ve got access to the NFL Network. By pretty much all measurable standards I’m a lucky guy.

Sure, I came from a poor family and, to paraphrase Mr. Buffett, I’m the son of a son of a convict, but another way to look at that is that by just staying out of jail I was the golden boy on our branch of the family tree. Lucky for me, it was just that easy!

It’s true that I had throat cancer a while back but I was lucky enough to have it diagnosed early, treated and next month I’ll be cancer free for two years! It’s hard to argue with that kind of luck.

So here I am living the dream on the Gulf Coast, doing a lot of writing and, thanks to a recent back procedure, feeling pain-free for the first time in years; yup, life was pretty sweet!

Then came the phone calls. The first came while I was pretending to work in my ocean front office and I never suspected that my luck and my life were about to change.

That call was from a very nice lady at the County Board of Health who politely informed me the injection I had received, that had so dramatically reduced my back pain, contained steroids from the batch identified with the recent meningitis outbreak.

After I mumbled something about how it seemed quite unlikely that out of the millions of people in the country that I ended up with one of the 13,000 tainted steroid vials (I think my actual words were something about flatulence and a whirlwind or something to that effect), she calmly asked me how I was feeling.

I admitted that I had been feeling a heck of a lot better before she called, but I guess she was looking for a more detailed answer because she started listing all of the symptoms of this special brand of fungal meningitis and, I swear to goodness, I felt very one of them as soon as she said them.

Suddenly I had a headache and I noticed sensitivity to light, my neck was sore and it seemed like I was slurring my speech! It’s just like when someone tells you the kid next door has head lice and your head starts itching. Admit it, you just scratched your head, didn’t you!

The nice lady told me that it could take weeks for the symptoms to present themselves so I should contact my primary care doctor and tell him that I had been exposed and so he would know what to do if I started getting sick.

For a moment I considered just ignoring the call and just hoping it would all just go away because…well… because I’m a guy and that’s how we think. After a few minutes I decided that it couldn’t hurt just to call the doctor and get it on the record on the off chance that I did get sick.

When I called they told that I should come into the office right away. When I got there they told me I needed to go to the emergency room and ask for a spinal tap to make sure I wasn’t sick.

There’s a better chance that monkeys will someday fly out of my butt than there is that I will ever ask anyone for a spinal tap…for any reason…but they had recorded that I was exposed to the stuff so I went back to plan A and proceeded to ignore the whole thing.

I was on my way to not get a spinal tap when I got the second call, this time from the state department of health, telling me that I should not get a spinal tap unless I had more than one of the symptoms on their list.

Suddenly, my headache was gone, the sunlight looked beautiful and I felt great! No spinal tap for this cowboy; I’d just received my “Get out of spinal taps for free” card from the state department of health! What a stroke of luck!

When you read this it will be four weeks since I got that injection and I feel fine; every time I see something on the news about the outbreak and I start thinking I have a stiff neck, I remember the spinal tap and I feel fine again, it’s magic.

So can a guy get cancer and get injected with a one in a million tainted drug still be considered lucky? When you’re still here to laugh about it you bet your sweet #*$ you can!!