I actually did get the number of the truck – ok, school bus – that hit me. It was 112. No harm done to any human, and minimal harm done to the car. I won’t say as much for a neighbor’s lawn, as I drove up onto it in an almost-successful attempt to avoid being swatted by a skidding bus.
But that just seems to be part and parcel of life around this neck of the woods. I was planning to take my mom and go visit my aunt and uncle in Akron again this year, this time sans kidlet. It just takes him too long to recover from the disruption of his expectations. That is now on hold, as their younger daughter, all of three years younger than I, has just been put on a transplant list for a liver transplant. Given her blood type (B-), I’m not holding my breath. So far no one in the family is a match.
The worst of it is that the damage was caused by physician carelessness. Her doctor put her on a dose of a drug that does liver damage way over the level recommended, and then never checked to see if it was affecting her liver for several years. I foresee a malpractice suit in the near future, but first things first – and the first thing is sheer survival. She has three kids, and while they’re pretty well grown, none of them has made the leap from “mom’s real sick” to “mom might die”. I understand that. It’s normal to think your parents are immortal when you’re 18 or 19. But the fact is that their mom very well might not survive this.
Then there are her folks. Her mom is worried sick about this daughter, and about the prospect that another of her kids might yet be put at risk to save the sibling’s life. (There’s one kid who has yet to be tested.) My aunt was planning to take off work the week Mom and I were coming in. Now she isn’t; she can’t stand to keep still. I understand it very well indeed.
On the other hand, the news from another quarter is good. A friend who had brain cancer a few years ago had called about a month ago, saying that it looked like there might be a new lesion on his most recent MRI. He had another today, and thank all deities you can think of, it’s clear. The docs have decided the spot was a radiation artifact.
And there’s something else huge in there too, but I’ll talk about that after the fact. I want it to happen so badly I can’t see straight, which leads directly to a superstitious fear that to talk about it would be to screw it up.
I think I’ll go to sleep for a while. Maybe when I wake up, the time-storm will be over. Even if it’s not, I’ll at least be more rested when I face it.
Is it me, or is the universe trying to spend the rest of its fourth quarter karma budget?