What an asp.

There are two kinds of drama in life: manufactured drama and inevitable drama. I avoid both, but I just outright don’t do manufactured drama and limit my time with people who do.

I figure the inevitable drama is going to come anyway, so why am I going to make things even harder for myself (and the people around me) in the meantime?

Take this week, for example. It has been drama central around here. Poisonous vipers, both literal and figurative, have reared their heads to strike. Let’s look at the difference between the inevitable and the manufactured:

We got a call from my brother on Wednesday morning that his girlfriend’s brother had been hiking with his wife in Cambodia and got bit by a green pit viper. Its venom is hematoxic, which means it prevents your blood from clotting when it enters your system. It took Asher a full day to even realize he’d been bit by a snake (apparently between the giant bugs and his many leech wounds, he thought an insect had gotten him. Cambodia, anyone?). His wife (a nurse) figured it out when the wound wouldn’t clot. It took another full day for the local snake bite clinic to arrange medical transportation to a top notch hospital in Bangkok, Thailand where they would have to test him to determine which specific serpent had bruised his heel, so to speak, so that they could give him the right antivenin (no, I didn’t misspell that). In the meantime, Asher was getting sicker and everybody else was getting more worried. By last night, his platelet count was…11. It should have been…uh, 1000. He was taking over ten hours to clot. It should have been taking about 5-ish minutes.

To make the rest of this long story short, he is showing a slow improvement and will probably be able to keep his leg. If he’s still stable by Saturday, then he’ll be permitted to fly home to London to continue his treatment there.

THAT is drama of the inevitable kind. Not so much the snakebite specifically, but the fact that bad stuff happens without any invitation. It’s hard on his loved ones. I don’t know Asher (because he’s English and London isn’t around the corner) but his sister has been with my brother longer than Kenny and I have been together. She’s family, and her mom is, too.

And here’s the thing…my brother knows and cares about Asher, and my sister does, too. And I care about them, and so I worry. Kenny and I prayed a lot as a family for Asher's recovery and for Nadine and her mom’s peace of mind. I felt really helpless to just sit and wait for updates. I worried about what would happen if the worst came to pass. Nadine doesn’t believe in God, and my brother doesn’t either, really. They don’t pray or believe in life after death. Would they be okay if they lost him? How do you get through that without faith? Could Nadine comfort herself with the knowledge that they had an amazing relationship and he had lived a full and adventurous life in a short time? Would it be enough? Was there anything Kenny or I could to help? I worried and worried and worried.

And that’s all for someone I don’t even know. The impact obviously grows deeper and greater the closer you get to the center. It's harder on my brother and even harder on Nadine. A million times harder than it was on me, and that was hard enough.

Would you EVER go out of your way to inflict that kind of worry and heart sickness on someone you love?

But people do. Take the second drama that unfolded with a phone call this morning…

This is a long post so I’ll get into it later, but trust me, a green pit viper sounds downright cozy compared to the craziness coming…

Sigh.