Did you miss me?

For the benefit of the two or three of you who may have noticed my absence lately, it’s because a cascading series of events leads me to this point, typing on my laptop in a hospital bed. Now that I have been reduced to what amounts to one continuous bruise, I can hasten to assure you that it’s not as bad as it looks, nothing to see here, thanks for asking. I’m back, and all indications are that recovery is in progress.

My occasional visits to hospitals always reinforce my faith in medical science, with an important caveat: Medicine is always – always – out of date. The procedures I endured in the past week did not exist 20 years ago. By the time I leave here, in a few days, someone somewhere will have improved on the treatment I was given. There’ s a conference in Boston at the end of the week for doctors specializing in what ails me today. Between cocktail parties and rubber chicken lunches, those practitioners will be exposed to methods and therapies that are “cutting edge” – for the moment. A year from now, new methods will emerge.

None of that is a bad thing. I have already outlived my parents, purely through civilization’s increased understanding of biology, physiology, medicine, and the holistic landscape of development. Barring any of the catastrophes that humans are so fond of bringing on ourselves – war, pestilence and disease, habitat destruction, willful denial or ignorance of risk (Hey! Watch this!) – my children should outlive me.

With any luck. That’s the other thing I’ve learned, after three-quarters of a century – there’s an element of luck (randomness, if you prefer) in every presumably predictable event.

Call it the “hit by a bus” contingency. In a movie I saw recently, there’s a long chase scene where someone is being chased by a gang of  killers. After a extended and harrowing series of close calls and near-misses, the would-be victim has escaped. He steps into the roadway, exhausted and relieved, and promptly gets hit by a bus.

It appears that I dodged the bus again. There’s no 9-lives limit to it. You can dodge a lot of buses before the one that going to get you comes along.  The irony is, the longer you survive, the better the science becomes – i.e., the avenues for escape improve.

So, if I might suggest: just keep moving, keep dodging, brush your teeth and take your vitamins. The rest is mostly in the interaction between your genetics and your environment, and perhaps a little luck.