Almost everything in Brunei is about oil – even the roads run in prolonged straight lines following the oil pipes that type a grid more than the land. Which meant that my drunk driver misjudged a rare flip, throwing the automobile into a wild spin down an embankment, in which it at some point stopped in a crushed smoking mess.
There had been five of us in the vehicle. Four of us walked away. The fifth fell to the ground in agony, clutching his back. Alcohol and adrenalin seeped away and, with raw clarity, I saw the scenario: on a pitch-black evening in the middle of a jungle, a boy lay screaming on the side of a street.
Following an eternity an ambulance came and he was taken to hospital. He was quite lucky. It was only muscle swelling and right after a few days in a wheelchair he recovered completely.
For days afterwards I felt the globe was so fragile that almost everything was about to fall apart. But once the concern passed I was left with a sense of elation – a 2nd-opportunity high – that I’d survived a near miss, and for a long time afterwards day-to-day residing glowed a minor brighter.
My third 2nd-possibility was psychological but it even now delivered a punch. As portion of the overall health checks on candidates for New Zealand citizenship, they X-ray your lungs to guarantee you’re cancer-totally free.
Waiting for my final results, I fretted and panicked. I utilised to smoke. I quit in my late twenties but I knew there was a likelihood that the injury was presently carried out. But after a couple of days I forgot all about it. Until a nurse referred to as and mentioned, “Mr Glancy, could you come to the surgery? There’s an incident on your X-ray.”
“An incident?” I mentioned, “What type of incident?”
When I arrived the physician looked quite serious, pointing at my X-ray, saying, “The incident is in this region.” I searched for a blooming shadow of death but said,
“I can’t see it.”
“This dark patch here,” he mentioned solemnly. He pointed yet again and added, “You seem to be missing a collarbone. Did you know that?”
The world snapped back and I took a deep breath, filling my cancer-totally free lungs, and explained, “Of course I know that!”
“Oh,” he explained, sounding disappointed, as if he had hoped that he was revealing some extraordinary fact to me.
People have a talent for taking factors for granted. At times we need to have to have something almost snatched away just before we can really enjoy it. All 3 experiences left me with a pure but tough-to-define notion, an notion so evident that close explanation triggers it to crumble a bit: no matter how bleak or complicated a tangle I’m in, I’m nonetheless here, alive, still full of that treasured factor that is such an every little thing that all as well often it’s taken for granted.
“Terms & Conditions”,(Bloomsbury, £12.99), by Robert Glancy, is offered from Telegraph Books
How to cheat death - at least twice
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