Personal:

On perspective and turning points

I mentioned briefly earlier this week that I was ill. What I did not give were the details. I've been piecing things together, and doing some other thinking, for reasons that will soon become clear.

I had food poisoning from some sunny-side up eggs I had cooked for myself Saturday night (comfort food for me). I was ill early Sunday morning. The toilet in my apartment here in France is not in the same room as the sink and bathtub/shower, it's in a small room off the hallway that leads to my front door. The geography here is important, because in that hallway I had some empty bottles that I was going to be taking out to the recycle bin (they require glass recycling here). I awoke early Sunday morning rushed to the toilet to get ill. After my body finished thinking it was getting rid of the poisons and I felt I could leave the toilet, I stood up to go wash my face. I got up too fast for my heart which was racing more than I was fully aware, and the world faded to black.

When I awoke, I was on the floor and I heard some kind of sound, which I now realize was me, moaning. As I had fallen, I hit those bottles on the floor, and I now have a cut on my nose and right eyebrow. It took me a while to piece the chain of events together, needless to say I wasn't entirely coherent Sunday morning with both being sick at my stomach and having a blow to the front of my head. At first, I thought I had hit the radiator in the hallway, but the neat ring shape of the cut on my brow indicated otherwise.

An inch farther to the right, and that bottle might have gone through my eye-socket into my brain.

No big skiing accident with my life flashing before my eyes, no spectacular story, just a simple combination of circumstances that added together to a "might have been" that is far more chilling than each and any of the individual, prosaic links in the event chain leading to the key chance of life versus death.

Death is usually this prosaic, unremarkable and unremarked, despite our desperate wish for some meaning, despite the happy endings Hollywood sells.

So for the last few days, I've been thinking about what would have happened if that inch farther to the right was not a "might have been." Even if I wasn't killed instantly, it may have been a few days before someone would have checked up on me. I could have bled to death on the floor.

Perspective and turning points seem very relevant to me right now.

I am doing some thinking, thinking that will remain private...

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NOTE: Comments to this post are turned off. I'm not looking for expressions of sympathy or horror. I'm working my way through what happened.