Today's my lucky day
Today is Dougal's lucky day and five is definitely his lucky number.
This blog is meant to be about media- and comms-related issues, but it's the fifth of May and at five to five this evening I'll reflect on the luckiest day of my life. I do so every year.
At that precise time in 1981 I was sprawled in a ditch with a .177 piece of lead in my head and blood pumping out at a rate of knots.
Forty yards away - and boy, am I glad it was not, say, 30 yards - my assailant lay prone in full sniper position tapping his rifle at a job well done. Mike Lee was still hopping around, having been shot in the leg - the reason I was in the ditch in the first place, hiding.
The skull is remarkably hard, I subsequently learned. Mine absorbed the pellet's power, fracturing in several places as it did and deflecting the pellet in to my eye socket, where it remains to this day. You should see the x-ray.
I don't bleep when I walk through airport security although, given that it's lead and most bullets are made from lead, you may consider that a bit worrying.
Anyhow, the good doctors at St. Paul's Eye Hospital told me I was the luckiest person they'd ever seen. Had the pellet been just a few millimetres lower it would have gone through my eye, in to my brain and probably killed me. Still a sobering thought and enough to give anyone cause to reflect on life's twists and turns.
So, I'll give silent thanks today at five to five on the fifth day of the fifth month and reflect on everything good that's happened to me since.
COMMENTS
No comments added for this entry.
POST A COMMENT
