Feeling lucky to be alive

(so many dumb ways to die)

So, I was sitting here staring at a blank sheet of paper, not wanting to draw more scribble monsters, not quite sure what chapter of Dad’s life I wanted to tackle, and thinking about how great spring is in the mountains when my fountain pen randomly wrote those words at the top of the page.

WAYS I COULD HAVE DIED

The subconscious is a weird playground, is it not?

Given that I am still very much alive, I rolled with it and thought about my near misses with the Grim Reaper.

I have rotten lungs - always have. One of my earliest memories was of being pummelled in an Australian sanitorium by a burly nun masquerading as a physiotherapist. Everyone thought I had TB, so I was confined to a prison-like institution for three weeks while they cultured the goop extracted from the depths of my lungs by regular thumpings by the nuns. I was four.

When I cried and said I wanted to see my mother, one of them said, “If you don’t stop crying, we won’t let her come back.”

I reported this to Mom during her next visit and, as you can imagine, starched white nurses’ caps flew as heads rolled. That was my first bout with pneumonia. Later, when I developed asthma, there were several more stays in intensive care units in various hospitals while pneumonia and asthma held parties in my lungs. None of those hospital visits, however, were more terrifying than my encounters with the nuns.

After Australia, we moved to Banff in the Rocky Mountains. I was eight years old when my parents caved in to my relentless pleas and bought me a horse. They patted me on the head (no helmet) and sent me off to entertain myself on horseback for hours at a time. Totally unsupervised, my horse and I explored the mountain trails until, eventually, I’d arrive home weary, happy, and just in time for dinner.

This nearly ended very badly when we accidentally wound up riding between a mother bear and her cubs. Mama chased her kids up a tree and then came after us. My horse spun around, nearly dumping me in the dirt, and barrelled off down the trail. I hung on for dear life, heart thudding, my cheeks whipped by my horse’s flying mane.

That was the first time I nearly died when a day out riding went badly.

All I can say is that the bridge looked like it would hold our weight. It didn’t.

The incident in Iceland probably deserves a whole comic of its own because it was so bizarre. A chunk of the incident is missing as I was knocked out after hitting my head on a lump of lava, but when I came to I was sitting on another horse in the middle of a river. I had no idea who I was, where I was, or how I had got there.

Later that night at a farmhouse, the farmer explained that sometimes fairies jumped on the backs of horses in Iceland and made them do weird things. By this point, I had figured out my name but was still uncertain of what was real, and what wasn’t. I didn’t even question the theory about the horse being temporarily possessed.

This was just dumb. But I was 18 and my boyfriend had a new TransAm. I wanted to see how fast it could go. Quite fast. That’s all I’ll say about that.

In ‘81 an evil dude with a switchblade stalked me through the streets of Paris. Though I was terrified, I think my later near-death experience in the same city was probably more dangerous.

Apparently, Tylenol toxicity is a thing. As in, a dangerous thing. I’m not a big person and when a horrendous infection (the result of a drill bit tip being left embedded in my jaw after a botched root canal) set into my jaw, I was nearly blinded with relentless, throbbing, horrendous pain. Agony. Can’t even describe how awful it was.

Anyway, in an attempt to continue to function (I was in Paris!!) I loaded up on Tylenol - and more Tylenol - and, hell, I’d better take another Tylenol - until I wound up turning my guts inside out into a Parisian toilet. I have never been so ill in my life. Very lucky I didn’t do my liver permanent damage. Found a dentist who took one look, loaded me up with antibiotics, and told me I would need to have surgery when I got home as the problem was too complicated to be dealt with while I was abroad.

I’m still dealing with the aftermath years later. Not of the Tylenol poisoning, but the tooth. But, I digress. That obnoxious tooth isn’t actually likely to kill me.

It would have been handy if I’d been able to take something else for pain like, say, Aspirin. But I have a life-threatening allergy to ASA and other NSAIDs. Before we figured out what caused my head to balloon to the size of a pumpkin, breathing passages to swell shut, etc. I remember sitting in an emergency room when a little kid walked past, took a look at me, grabbed his mother’s hand, and asked, “Mommy! What is that!?”

Probably the most terrifying moment, though, when I stared death in the face was at the top of a climb. I thought I had clipped in and leaned back to test the system before asking to be lowered to the ground by my climbing partner. I glanced down at my harness and saw I had somehow not clipped the carabiner fastening me to the rope to my harness loop.

A fraction of a second later and I would have been falling, but fortunately for me (and my partner, who would have been traumatized beyond words had I fallen to my death at her feet), I still had a good grip on the chain at the top of the climb and was able to clip in again and be lowered safely.

That’s what one gets for taking part in a sport where the consequences of a small mistake can be catastrophic.

Until tomorrow - adieu! (Assuming I will see tomorrow, because after all that, would it not be ironic to be taken out by an aneurysm in my sleep?)