Blame The Cat!
Putting risk into perspective.
After 4 weeks of fever, hospital and doctor visits, episodes of imaging, scanning, IVs, needles being driven into my spine and seemingly endless blood draws I have a diagnosis:
Cat scratch fever.
Caused by the Bartonella henselae bacterium. Which you get, not surprisingly, from infected cats.
Cats rarely show any symptoms of it. They get it, for a couple of months it hangs around and then it goes away. But the poor, unsuspecting humans the infected cats live with can also become infected
If you’re like me cat scratch fever sounds like the punchline to a joke. Or the name of an annoying song from the ’70s. What it doesn’t sound like is a serious illness.
And most of the time it isn’t. But occasionally it can create problems. Like high fevers. Or encephalopathy which, while rare, can result in brain damage or death. It can also get into your bones and result in bone damage which, again rarely, can require amputation to resolve.
Thinking about risk
Now I’m taking antibiotics so presumably those things are no longer a concern for me, at least in the short term!
Of course, antibiotics are not without issues of their own. The one I’m taking, doxycycline, can cause something called inter-cranial hypertension, or as I like to call it “exploding head syndrome.” It doesn’t actually cause your head to explode, but it can lead to blindness. It’s “rare.” But they don’t say what they consider rare to be. One in a million? One in a thousand? Who knows?
Which brings me to my first point. We take risks every day. Lots of them. And yet we rarely think about the potential consequences of those risks.
For example, you have roughly a 1 in 44,939 chance of being killed in a car accident in any given year. Which seems like pretty good odds. But your odds of dying in a plane crash in any given year are much better — 1 in 846,024. And yet there are far more people who are terrified of flying then there are of driving.
But who thinks about the odds when they’re climbing into their car? Or climbing a ladder? Or walking down the stairs? Or going swimming? Who thinks about the odds when they go to a restaurant? Or when they decide it would be a good idea to take up vaping?
Who thinks about the odds when they decide to get a cat?
What are the odds?
Most of us don’t think much about the odds because it would be impossible to get through a day. You’d spend all your time worrying about your potential fatality load. You do so many things that could cause you to die on any given day it seems like you’re pretty much guaranteed to have a disaster involving death or at the very least some sort of horrific accident resulting in the loss of a limb.
And yet, for the vast majority of people, none of these things ever happens. People aren’t dropping like flies because they’re crushed by toppling vending machines (although some people, presumably with anger issues, are) or because they habitually stand in a puddle of water while trying to use a fork to extract a piece of burnt toast from a toaster while its still on!
There are a lot of things on the list of fatal activities that people do every day without thinking about how close they are to death. In spite of the things on this list, most of us just get on with our lives.
Things that won’t kill you
Here’s a thing that’s not on the “could cause you to die” list that people are terrified of: public speaking. Here’s another: starting a business. Speaking up in a meeting. Standing up for yourself. None of these things will cause you to die. Or even be lightly disfigured. But people are scared shitless by them.
Get into a vehicle that can accelerate to speeds that, if stopped suddenly by, say, a concrete abutment will instantly turn you into a thin film of protoplasm spread all over the inside of said vehicle? Not a problem. Bring it on.
But if called upon to speak truth to power we’re practically soiling ourselves in fear.
Mistakes were made — or were they?
Here’s an example of what can happen when you do this. I worked at an advertising agency called Hal Riney & Partners on the original Saturn (the car, not the planet) launch campaign. There were several teams working on the various commercials we were shooting that summer of 1990 and mine was the last to leave. As we were on our way out the door Hal’s assistant handed me an envelope with 3 scripts in it that Hal wanted us to shoot. He had written them the night before.
As we were flying to Spring Hill Tennessee, which is where the Saturn plant was, I took a look at the scripts. They were awful. But Hal was the man! So we went ahead and shot them along with everything else.
Back in San Francisco several months later we had all our commercials edited and we went to present them to Hal. He loved everything. It was a huge success. But I hadn’t shown him his commercials yet. In fact, I think he’d probably forgotten about them because he didn’t ask where they were. But we showed them anyway.
He hated them. Hated!
After he had seen all three there was silence in the room for an uncomfortably long time. Finally he said, “Who wrote this crap?”
No one said anything. I finally piped up.
“You did, Hal.”
He glowered at me. “I would never write this kind of shit.” Then he got up and left.
I was fired a month later. The first time in the 12 years I’d worked in advertising that had happened to me.
This sounds like a terrible outcome, right? Why would anyone speak truth to power after something like this?
Except the story doesn’t end there. I’d only worked there for 10 months. But they felt guilty because I had actually done a good job. So I got 3 months of severance. At that point my goal was to become a commercial director. They started giving me commercials to work on so I could build my reel and make some money. I got a long format corporate piece for Saturn. All this allowed me to build a reel and start my career as a director.
Now I’m not saying that every outcome will be like mine. But if people say and do really stupid things at a place you’re working, why do you want to work there anyway? Occasionally we need some kind of impetus to move on to the next good thing in our lives.
Ultimately I think it’s important to put everything into perspective. Because the things we spend the most time obsessing about are usually not the things that are going to kill us. But it does seem like the fear of public humiliation, or even the possibility of it is actually more powerful than the fear of death.
Would it kill you to launch that new business?
No.
So what are you waiting for?
