The Luck of the Draw

This morning I went for a routine blood test to satisfy the requirements for a new volunteer position at a local hospital. By the time you're my age, having blood drawn is certainly not worth worrying about. But still, over the years the outcomes of this minor procedure have varied. Best case scenario: I can barely see where the needle was inserted in my arm. But today, once I got home and removed the bandaid the nurse had applied, I found an angry purple bulge the size of a Greek olive -- one of those big ones.

A few hours have passed and it now looks like a flattened Greek olive, still purple and angry. I assume in time it will dissipate, and I'm not an arm model so no biggie, yet I had to wonder why it was there at all. Did I drink too much coffee at breakfast? Was I dehydrated? Or was the nurse, a lovely young woman I enjoyed talking with, simply lousy at drawing blood? Unless it gets worse, I'll write it off as bad luck.

This relatively common experience got me thinking about how often "the luck of the draw" impacts our lives, and I'm not just talking about the Powerball. Two perfect people come together to conceive a child, and the wrong sperm reaches the egg to produce a terribly damaged fetus, which matures into a person saddled with lifelong deficiencies and disabilities. Or maybe the sperm was fine but the egg was damaged, no matter. The point is, lives are changed in an instant by circumstances far beyond our control.

When I was eight years old I was enrolled in the first national tests of a trial polio vaccine. Kids my age across the country were given injections of the newly-minted Salk vaccine in a controlled blind experiment. Half of us got the drug, the other half got water. I got the good stuff.

Twenty-five years later I met Sue, a wheelchair-bound colleague at a newspaper where I worked. She was exactly my age and had also been part of the Salk experiment, but she got the placebo. And then she got polio.

You can try as hard as you can to do the right thing, be in the right place at the right time and eat all your vegetables, but in the end, much of life is determined by the luck of the draw.