[August 21, 2001]

On Friday, June 13, 1980, at 9:11PM, in Wichita, KS, I was born. It was 110 degrees. And my parents misspelled my name. The fact that I’m still alive should be surprising to anyone who believes in bad luck. Or knows my parents.

Being born on a Friday the 13th is supposed to elicit some sort of black magic voodoo. Maybe it’s black magic voodoo that kept me kicking inside my mom for an extra two days past my due date of June 11; maybe if I’d been born any earlier or a few hours later, I would have succumbed to one of the several biological insults I’ve encountered in my 33, almost 34 years of life.

 

 

Of the members of the animal kingdom, cats are typically most associated with luck. Bad luck, that is. But in order to offset their inherent bad luck, the cosmos also blessed them with Nine Lives. I’m sure one of these lives is automatically deducted for having to survive in our world and the dangers we cause. This basically leaves them with eight lives to negotiate their own existence.

 

 

The bad luck I was blessed/cursed to be born with would make me a logical choice to be a kindred spirit to cats. But I’m allergic to cats. Cats love to cause me allergic reactions. Kindred spirits we are not.

This being the case, I’m more of a dog person. I grew up with them in my house my entire life. But guess what, I’m even more allergic to their dander than cats’. Yet, it didn’t dissuade my parents from keeping them around. A lot of them.

So like the cats who dabble in bad luck, I’ve channeled my dark voodoo magic luck into Nine Lives. Let’s see where I stand…

 

 

Life #1: Ended at age 4. Frolicking in Lake Michigan while pretending to be a pelican is a good way to have a bunch of microbe-infested lake water go pouring into your lungs. The next morning when I awoke with a death-rattle wheeze and sky-high temp, my parents rushed me to the nearest hospital. I spent 5 days living in a plastic bubble (yep, I was a bubble boy) while the doctors and nurses pumped me with antibiotics to crush the pneumonia that was trying to suffocate me.

 

 

During my hospital stay, I developed a disdain for Jell-O (it was the only thing I was allowed to eat), which grew exponentially by the day and has been maintained throughout my life. Thankfully though, this developing hatred was off-set by my introduction to video games, which I was allowed to play all day long.

Atari. Centipede. Bye Bye Pneumonia!

 

 

Life #2: Ended at age 12… when I had my last major asthma attack. Right around this time, I became sentient enough to realize the main cause of the nearly dozen Emergency Room visits and two hospitalizations I had sustained over the last 7 years were the dogs living in my house. I was constantly grabbing my inhaler, trying to breathe over the dander infesting every square inch of our home. My parents knew I was allergic, as I’d received numerous shots, been put on oral corticosteroids causing me to gain 20 pounds of fat in two months, and was constantly having fits of eczema, which left me physically scarred to this day. [I dare you to take a bath in betadine with open wounds all over your body… I was screaming for days.]

Before this time, I simply wasn’t smart enough to realize why every time I played with my dog I started itching, wheezing, and sneezing. Once I had this ah-ha! moment, I tried to be more cautious… but that was pretty much like running through a cabbage patch full of land mines when you have five dogs at home and one of them sleeps on your bed.

 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sT4-UcTkc-A

 

[Note: I’m also allergic to horses. Maybe worse than dogs. Ok, definitely worse than dogs. But my parents made me go to horse shows and be around horses my entire childhood too. I’ve concluded they were trying to thin the herd in our household. Well guess what… survival of the fittest! All of those animals are d-e-a-d. And I’m not.]

 

 

Life #3: Ended at age 20. I was on Christmas break from college and only two days away from attending the Debutante Ball with my good friend Katherine. I was in Lexington, staying the night at her parents home, when I started feeling like my allergies and asthma were acting up. I tried all of my normal tricks to make myself feel better: anti-histamines, albuterol inhaler, hot shower, fresh air, etc, etc. But I still felt my difficulty breathing increasing. I didn’t dare try to sleep. I simply sat up in bed, trying to gulp in air when possible, puffing on my inhaler every hour, but to no avail.

 

 

Eventually, her father woke up the next morning at 5AM and between gasped breaths, I asked if he would mind taking me to the hospital. Obviously, he obliged.

In the Emergency Department, the doctor diagnosed me with… tracheitis… solving the mystery of why my inhaler and other tricks weren’t working. He pumped me full of antibiotics and inhaled steroids to decrease the swelling and discharged me by 11AM. I rested the entire day and made the Debutante Ball with no one the wiser.

 

 

[Note: So by age 20, I’d had the alveoli (the little sacks at the furthest reaches of your lungs) get infected and inflamed causing my pneumonia. I’d had my bronchi (the muscular extensions branching off into the individual lungs) get consistently irritated from allergic insults and cause my horrific childhood asthma. And now my trachea (the air pipe that leads from your throat to the bronchi) get infected somehow and slowly close off my air passage… Friday. The 13th. In. Effect.]

 

 

Life #4: Ended at age 21. Only nine months after surviving some bizarro bacterial infection that threatened to cut off my oxygen supply, I was driving east on US-70 outside of Kansas City when I was struck by a semi-tractor trailer traveling  35 mph. Luckily for my brother and I, we were encased in my 1983 Mercedes-Benz station wagon. [See image at the beginning of this post.]

We had left KC only 45 minutes earlier while a slow, misty rain was falling on the highway. My brother and I were heading back to Ohio, where we were about to begin school again after spending some time in Kansas visiting friends. He was sleeping in the passenger seat, his head resting on the frame of the door.

 

 

As I drove along the two-lane highway, I could see traffic was stopped ahead of us and the right lane was clear because an ambulance had maneuvered its way to a small collision 300 yards in the distance. As I came to a stop in the left-hand lane, with the right lane completely devoid of any traffic, and with a red truck stopped only a half car-length ahead of us, I ever-so-slightly turned my steering wheel to the right… I reflexively peeked up into the rear-view mirror… only to see the grille of a semi smash into the back of my pseudo German tank. All hell broke loose.

 

 

When all was said and done, my brother and I were alive… But the scene was chaos. The Ghetto Sled (as I affectionately termed my car) had jettisoned into the right-hand lane, barely clipping the red truck in front of us (rather than being smashed accordian-like into the bed of the truck). The front passenger-side of TGS smashed into the retaining wall of the overpass, spilling transmission fluid all over the road. (Yes, we were on an overpass… from which we could have flipped over and onto the traffic below.)

 

 

My brother, asleep at the time of the accident, had violently smashed his head into the frame of the car, causing him to seize, and me to believe, that he had died. (He had to be removed from TGS with the jaws-of-life and air-lifted to the nearest hospital.)

 

 

I instinctively turned off the car, swung open the driver’s side door, and climbed out. My body was completely numb, but I simultaneously felt as if every bone in my body was broken as I stumbled towards the driver of the red pickup. I then looked at what was left of the TGS, my brother seizing in the passenger’s seat, and the smashed grill of the semi behind us.

Thankfully, the EMS responders who were tending to the minor fender-bender ahead of us had seen the entire accident unfold. They threw the ambulance in reverse, and due to a clear right-hand lane, were tending to my brother in a matter of seconds.

Somehow, I came away from the whole scene with only minor lower back musculoskeletal damage and some wicked whiplash. My brother spent the night in the hospital, was found to have no grave cranial or neurological damage, and was released the next day.

[Note: When we went to the junk yard to collect whatever was left of our belongings from TGS, I recovered a few meaningful mementos. But most importantly, in the pocket behind the driver’s seat was a picture of my second cousin Eddie, a dashing and handsome man, dressed in a tuxedo while flashing his million dollar smile. He had been killed at 31 years old when a semi-tractor trailer operated by an intoxicated driver barreled through a turn and demolished his car. I don’t believe in God. But I believe in Eddie.]

 

 

If you think a semi is my last brush with death… you ain’t heard nothing yet… If you’re feeling lucky, come back for Nine Lives… part II.