Still breathingI suck at this. Maybe I'll be Buddhist tomorrow.

Many people are well acquainted with Murphy’s Law–if something can go wrong, it will go wrong at the worst possible moment.

But we in the Murphy family (and the extended families) are especially vulnerable to this miserable law in our universe. Like my dad for instance.  He’s had so many near misses and disappointments such as:

• a train splitting the car he was driving in two, but walking away from the crash*
• cross-country skiing again after a long absence from the sport, and then having a massive heart attack
• a series of psycho tenants who destroyed his rental properties

All that and yet he wins every raffle he enters.  After two divorces, his finances are no roaring hell, but he has more dufflebags, charity golf shirts and church basement doilies than you can shake a stick at.

I think having the Murphy name just invites that law into the centre of one’s life. The one exception is my sister’s dog, which she named Murphy.

Kate got married and ditched the Murphy name as fast as she could. She claims that she felt that bestowing her former surname on her dog was a tribute. Those of us who still use the moniker found it a wee bit insulting, but we let it go.

In an ironic twist of fate, the dog–a matted-looking mutt of indeterminate parentage–got all the good luck. Murphy’s now 15 years old and has enjoyed uncharacteristic good health for a Murphy.

My sister, not so much. The rest of the family, not so much either. But Kate. Let me put it this way, we call her Calamity Kate and our standards for calamity are high.

Here’s her short list of childhood/teenage travails:

• burns to the chest sustained when she dropped a sparkling sparkler down her shirt
• a concussion brought on by solo teeter-tottering on 2×4 balanced across a metal tub
• a couple of near drownings
• a broken nose after being sucker punched by a jealous girlfriend
• minor cuts and scrapes after being thrown through a plate glass window at a Bon Jovi concert

Then there were the adult debacles and hardships:

• catching on fire while preparing tea
• concussion sustained when I tackled her to put out said fire, using the drop, stomp and roll technique
• unintended electric shock therapy while adjusting the knob on an old radio
• longer and longer labours–unmedicated–for each successive child (hello, they’re supposed to get shorter!)
• the emergency appendectomy days after delivering her first child
• childbirth-related emergency surgeries following the birth of two of her kids

This isn’t a complete catalogue of misfortune, mind you, just the lowlights. And I’m not going to trivialize tragedies by including them here, and believe me, we’ve been through quite a few heart crushers.

Her youngest daughter has a life threatening peanut allergy. Little Grace was rushed to the hospital twice in a single month–once with anaphylaxis and the other time for respiratory distress brought on by pneumonia.

And most recently, there was the broken leg Kate sustained after jumping off a breakwater into six inches of water.*

And if you’re going to break your leg, why not get the worst possible ankle break ever? One requiring the installation of six screws, two nails and a plate to put the shards back together. Just take another gander at the purty picture up yonder one more time. One doctor likened the damage to someone taking an axe to your bones, but leaving your skin intact.

A few weeks later, someone hit her car in the parking lot and her husband got laid off–all on the same day. Is that three? They say bad things come in threes. The thing is that there’s an unlimited number of threes in this family.

That reminds me of my Uncle John (not the Uncle John on Manitoulin Island , but the one who lives on Joe Lake in Hanmer). He saved up for five years for a self-funded, one-year leave from teaching. The first month of his leave, he was in the hospital on the slow mend from broken vertibrae, ribs, teeth and a leg. A tree he was cutting down on this property didn’t take too kindly to his chainsaw and crushed him.

He could have written a book called, Dealing with Disappointment. In the end, Uncle John’s happy he can walk. “Bones heal,” he said when I asked him about it.

I’ve kvetched about my run of shit luck in my “paranoid” series here, here and here. Misery loves company and we’re sisters in calamity, I tell you.

Kate was bound and determined to come here for a visit after she got her cast off. The Wednesday before she left, she dropped her Kia Borrego off for an oil change at the dealership. The technician backed her SUV out of the bay and proceeded to squash the daylights out of a Kia Forte.

“Are you f—ing kidding me? Am I being punk’d?!” Kate told me later, recounting the situation. “OK, so you’re blind. There’s a backup sensor in the car. How could you not f—ing hear that!”

An order was made for a new bumper for Kate. The other car looked like a write off.

On a rainy drive home, the electrical system in her SUV started to spasm. The wipers stopped working, the locks kept popping on and off and her headlights failed. Back to the dealership. All fixed.

Friday night at 10:30 p.m. the phone rang. Never good. Phone calls before 7 a.m. and after 9 p.m. are never good.

“It’s Kate. I’m outside Kingston on the f—ing 401, it’s pitch-f—ing-black out here and I have no headlights!”

Aw shit. She’s on crutches, with three kids and an elderly pooch (who is doing just fine, thankyouverymuch).

Kate managed to get to Kingston (driving by feel) and on her third try, found a motel that would accept dogs.  The next day, she got a rental and pulled into our driveway around lunch time.

I would have gone home. I’m in awe of how she powers through these things.

I asked her once how she does it.

“I tell myself I won’t let tragedy define me,” she said. “And for the smaller stuff, I get by on rage, wine and humour.”

I wouldn’t want to be that Kia dealership owner right now. Hurricane Kate is heading your way.

*Surprisingly, alcohol was not a factor in either of these accidents.

Tags: bad luck, broken ankle, Murphy's law

This entry was posted on Sunday, October 3rd, 2010 at 9:44 pm and is filed under Freaking outing, Life can suck, Ties that bind (family). You can follow any comments to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a comment, or trackback from your own site.