Getting Your Arm Gnawed Off by a Shark

Back in 2007-2009 ish, I kept a blog, The Oxygen Chronicles. The Oxygen Chronicles was about breathing in all forms -- physically, psychologically, philosophically...on and on. It talked a lot about American Idol, too; this one won't.

At essence, it was about how we all are just trying to breathe. As it says in the header, I popped into the world back in 1971. I came out backwards, and no doctor had prepared my mother for a breech birth.

Right away I was a pain in the ass, but you really can't blame me:

First, imagine coming feet first out of a scary 1970's vagina. Secondly, I was like a plane on a clogged runway, waiting for permission to lift off and head for... Worcester, Massachusetts. Worcester aside, being stuck must have been horrible, plus no one dropped an oxygen mask.

I got back at all of them by being dead silent and the color of a plum. Then, I disappeared.

My mother cried, and cried. My father paced and fumed. My mother thought I was deformed. That was her worst-case scenario - not that my organs were rotting away in my mucus clogged chicken body, but that I was a cyclops or elf-eared.

Eventually, a nurse strolled into the hospital room, cradling my lilac-hued self and presented me to my mother. I was starry-eyed and gurgling with reflux. Same as today.

Then, I coded, but at least I had a nose.

Breathing has never been intuitive to me. Aside from a lifetime of asthma, when I become anxious, I hold my breath and stiffen my muscles.  I stop myself from breathing. (Do you do that, too? Next time you feel anxious, check your breathing. Exhale for a little relief.)

But, so many of us are struggling to breathe. We don't want to get out of bed; not only that, but we wonder how anyone else does. Who are these alien life forms - these people who actually want to pull from bed, put their corny feet on the floor and get out of their fuzzy pj pants?

On my worst days, during the most challenging periods in my life, I view people through my high school eyes. I see human beings as happy or miserable. Winners or losers. Popular or unwanted.

But, when I'm feeling more rational or challenge my thinking, I know that's not true.

My unhealthy self sees a fixed caste.  Some folks are just perfect. Their lives are a song. When I measure myself with that kind of yardstick, of course I feel like a failure. There is no grey area. But, being static is not a natural state for anything. There's the old adage that "The only constant is change." Something like that. But, it's true.

People's lives exist on a continuum. There are wonderful years when their marriages are working well, life is prosperous, jobs are well-paid -- all is doing well. But, all it takes is a minute, or an event and everything changes.

As a teenager, I listened to America's Top Forty with Dick Clark every Sunday. One Sunday, Whitesnake was sailing high at #1 with "Here I Go Again." Weeks flew by at number one, and Tawny Kitaen kept twerking on Jaguars. One day, she fell off the hood. Then, she noticed David Coverdale's acne pits. She realized they both had severely damaged hair.

If that song didn't stay at number one, what chance do you and I have?

If we want to stay fixed, we'll live fixed. But, we're not meant to. Change is our true nature.


I'm sure you can come up with incredible boundaries that get pushed every day. Animals that transcend abuse to ride on Zoombas. People whose arms are bitten off by a shark, yet they still find a way to surf. Two months later, they either win the world surfing championship or are carried away like a hoagie into the deep sea.


**The documentary about the blond chick who got her arm bitten off my a tiger shark was on today, so I had a healthy shift in my thinking. Tomorrow, my back pain will be raging or my hormones will be swinging, and I'll see myself as a forever loser living in a cruel, brutal world.

Stay tuned.