My lucky day

Friday the 13th is always known as the unluckiest day of the year.

But really, I've come to know that particular day as just the opposite. I know that I can't exactly speak for the majority of people, given the amount of struggle and hardship that I've seen, but I've been very blessed when it comes to my luck on Friday the 13th.

On that day in Sept.,1996, I was in the hospital for what was supposed to be a major, yet routine hip surgery to correct some displacement in the joint that I had dealt with all my life. I was only eight years old at the time, but I still had been made fully aware of what was going on and the risks associated. I thought I was completely prepared and fine with the whole situation, but I never could have thought of what was going to happen when I got in the operating room.

The surgery went very well and everything that doctors had hoped to accomplish worked out quite well. But, I spent the next several days not really feeling well, very sluggish, and not really knowing why. And for what I thought to be no reason, the doctors decided to put me on an iron supplement for several weeks aftere the operation. It wasn't until several days after the surgery that I was given the truth as to what really went on in that room.

When I finally started to get a little better and the surgeon came in to talk to me several days after surgery, I found out that although everything that the surgical team had hoped to accomplish with my hip was done, they were unable to complete the portion of the surgery that had been planned to be done on my ankle. Not because they took longer than expected and got too tired to do it all at once, as I was told in the beginning, but because they had taken extra time and that resulted in me coming within 15 to 20 minutes of bleeding to death.

If that surgical team had not been keeping such a close eye on my blood loss, then I would not have come off of that operating table that day. Taken at face value, the situation may not seem very lucky, but I feel that I got very luckky that day because those doctors could have easily not noticed how much blood I had lost and continued on with the surgery, an act that would have resulted in my death.

Another incident that occurred nine years later on Friday, May 13, 2005, was a little more my fault.

I was about to finish my junior year in high school at the time, and I was on my way from my regular high school to a class I was taking at a local vocation-technical school. I was getting on the highway to make the drive between schools, and when I merged into traffic, I didn't see a pickup truck hauling a horse trailer speeding by me, so I merged into that person's lane, and ended up hitting her.

The truck and horse trailer was obviously a very unstable vehicle to attempt to drive under normal circumstances, but when it gets side swiped at highway speed, because undoubtedly much worse. That accident could and probably should have resulted in the truck running off of the road into the median and possibly rolling over, leading to very serious injuries for its occupants. But, the woman driving it was able to keep control and maintain her lane, thus making the accident result in nothing more than a few minor paint scratches from the impact.

These are just a couple of the example of how my luck has been much better than one might expect on Friday the 13, but if I chose to, I could go on and on with even more stories. I never reall subscribed to any of those sorts of superstitious beliefs, but now that I've had as many great luck experiences as I have, I'll never consider Friday the 13th as any thing but a very lucky day.