I lived with my grandmother. Here’s What I Learned About Life and Luck
This is a true story of my grandmother and grandfather.
A man named John is on a walk with his dog, Bella. While on the walk, John loses Bella after she pulls the leash from his hand in pursuit of a rabbit that happens to jump out of a bush as they pass by it.
John chases after Bella but this only inspires her to run faster, until she completely eludes John’s vision, continuing on her pursuit of the rabbit that has, by now, hidden somewhere in the other direction.
After a great deal of time passes, it becomes clear that Bella has outrun her sense of orientation and is now lost.
John spends the rest of the day and the days following searching for Bella. He notifies neighbors, enlists friends and family to help, puts up signs, and so on.
A week goes by, Bella is still missing. John is devastated beyond comprehension; he thinks about how horribly unlucky it was that the rabbit jumped out at just the wrong time and that his hand position was just in the wrong place to allow Bella to pull the leash from it.
About another week later, a woman shows up at John’s front door, she has Bella. After Bella and John reconnect in a chaotic, heart-warming display of affection, John thanks the woman.
She introduces herself and tells John her name is Victoria. She’s beautiful and about John’s age. John and Victoria talk for a little while and seem to hit it off. In the following weeks they hang out several times and things go so well, they soon begin dating.
John finds her to be absolutely gorgeous, kind, funny, smart, spontaneous. All the right buzzwords for a perfect romantic partner in a story. Soon, John and Victoria fall in love, the relationship is everything one could reasonably hope a relationship to be.
John thinks about how lucky it was that Victoria was the person who happened to be in the right place at the right time to find and return Bella. A couple months go by, John is driving on his way to pick up Victoria. While driving through an intersection, John is T-boned at full speed by a driver who distractedly runs a red light coming from the perpendicular side street.
John is knocked unconscious as he and his car are sent in a thrashing 180° spin. An hour or so later, John finds himself in a hospital. A doctor informs John of what has happened, and explains that he has suffered a severe head injury, and that they will need to run some immediate tests as well as a brain scan to determine the severity, and if there’s any chance of permanent brain damage or internal bleeding.
As his consciousness begins to more clearly return to him, John thinks about how unlucky it was to be going to get Victoria in the exact direction at the exact time. He’s furious at the possibility that his life could be ruined by this one, random happenstance.
John is held overnight at the hospital. The next day, the doctor comes into John’s room.
“John how are we doing?” the doctor asks.
“Fine. A little fuzzy, I guess." John replies.
“Yeah, I would certainly imagine. You took quite the smack.” The doctor says.
“Yeah”. John responds.
“So, I’ve reviewed the CT scan and I have some bad news, and I also have some good news.”
Confused, John says, “Ok! uhm, I guess I’ll take the bad news first.”
“Well, technically, they’re sort of the same piece of news.” Says the doctor.
“What do you mean?” John asks with an escalating level of concern and confusion.
“The bad news is we found what appears to be a glioma in your brain.” The doctor pauses for a moment, as John looks at him, unaware of what this means.
“It’s a tumor.” The doctor goes on to say. “The good news though, is we found what appears to be a glioma in your brain.”
“What do you mean? How is that good news? John asks.
“This tumor has nothing to do with your accident. You actually got out of the accident relatively unharmed. But because of your accident, we ran the brain scan. Because of the brain scan, we found the tumor. Normally, we only catch a tumor like this after someone realizes something is wrong when they start to feel the symptoms, which is almost always too late. Because we found the tumor right now, though, we caught it while it’s still benign, before it became malignant and grew into any other areas of your brain, which in most cases becomes fatal. Since it’s still in this stage, though, we should be able to remove it almost entirely without any issue.”
“John, in a weird way, this car accident basically saved your life. So, I guess, you know, sort of good news disguised as bad news.” The doctor concludes.
John starts to feel a weird visceral tingling sensation and becomes slightly disoriented.
Maybe it’s the head injury. Maybe it’s the emotion of the situation. Maybe it’s the fact that the doctor just essentially said the same thing twice, but John experienced two totally different mental responses. Maybe it’s everything.
Regardless, John looks around the room. He thinks about how lucky he was to have been going to get Victoria in the exact direction at that exact time. He thinks about how lucky he was to have gotten in the car accident. He thinks about how weird it is to think this.
For something so bad to be so good and for something so good to be so bad.
At this moment, John realizes how little he knows about what anything actually is. That he has never and can never know what exists on the other side of anything that happens to him or because of him, no matter how good or bad, lucky or unlucky any of it might seem. John feels a strange, paradoxical sense of helplessness and liberation.
About a week later, John undergoes brain surgery to remove the tumor. The surgery was successful. John is mostly as good as new, with exception to a scar running down the side of his scalp.
Several days later, after being released from the hospital, John is at home with Victoria, recovering.
To get some fresh air, he takes Bella out for a walk.
Thanks for reading. On your way out, leave a comment.
