Tempting Fate?

Do you ever feel that no matter what you do, if you are relying on a certain outcome, Fate sits back and rubs its hands with glee?  You can almost here the chafing of celestial palm against celestial palm.  You would turn round and glare if you could see quite where it was coming from.

It’s that knowing that you’ve prepared a great presentation but the venue turns out not to have a projector; spending ages on hair and makeup only to be caught in a freak rain storm on an otherwise cloudless day; saying no, I don’t think I got this year’s killer cold and instantly feeling your adenoids swell…

There seems little point sometimes in trying to cover every possibility.  Fate is almost guaranteed to find some loophole.  You could decide to bear the laughter and hoist a massive rucksack full of emergency supplies and equipment over your elegant evening dress, only to have the shoulder strap snap or the zip get stuck.  Sometimes it seems that trying to pre-empt the inevitable only makes that abstract being snigger harder.

What’s got me so bothered about it?  Well, in just over two weeks, I’m going into hospital for a surgical procedure and I know that, whenever I pin my hopes on something medical, there are delays, complications, obstacles, and all the while Fate sits there saying “you dared to hope”.

I’m going so far as to write a will before I go in.  It just seems to me that if I don’t, they’ll slip and sever something vital, or I’ll react badly to the anaesthetic, or I’ll be out and on the ward and have a seizure or a heart attack.  Paranoid?  It might sound that way.  But it’s more a case of learning through experience that whatever I do to prepare, and whatever instructions I give verbally, something will happen that could not have been predicted.  There’s always the chance that if I put everything in place that I can, the whole thing will be cancelled for some freak occurrence.

Surely, by my own theory, I hear you thinking, writing a will means that even if I jumped off the cliffs at Marsden I’d end up maimed but not dead?  That’s probably true, and that’s exactly why I wouldn’t jump off the cliffs at Marsden no matter how much I wanted it all to end!  Fate would not let me get away with it.  There’s a chance that if anything goes wrong in the operating theatre that I’ll survive but in pain and on medication for the rest of my life.  Should I really write a will?  Am I not setting myself up for living torture by doing that?  Well, I can almost hear Fate sucking the air over its teeth right now.

“She’s writing a will.  That means I can’t kill her off.  But she’s now written a public article about it, so how does that affect maiming her instead?  There must be something I can do to thwart her.  I’ve never let a chance go by yet.  She’s learned not to say certain things aloud and she’s learned not even to write certain things down.  What loophole can I employ here?  There must be one!”

So in the meantime, I’ll be thinking of ways to have the least hope, the least expectation, but at the same time take the most precaution and give the most information to the people slicing and dicing me.  Fate will get me back for it somehow, I know, and I’ll be waiting…