Catching Air Over a Speed Bump
“You ought to enter this contest!” Terri Lynn said, pointing to an in-store ad about a chance to win a KitchenAid appliance. “You’re lucky. You won a car!”
My wife was referring to the most valuable merchandise I’d ever won — a car that a local dealer had put up in a drawing at a county fair. My entry probably was one among hundreds stuffed in the entry box over the course of a weekend. I guess I did beat some pretty good odds. However, that was back in the ’70s.
I also won a new mountain bike once — the grand prize at a Cisco Systems Bike-to-Work Day event in the mid-’90s. Of course, there had been an unseasonal rain that day, which cut the field considerably. I was one of just five or six dozen riders who actually hit the road. That made the odds a lot better.
With a little imagination, you might see a trend here — my odds improving over time, but the prizes getting smaller.
So perhaps it was no surprise that when I got in a lottery where the odds of winning were a generous 1 in 7, my number again came up.
But this time the value of the win dipped into the negative. The odds: 1 out of 7 older men will get prostate cancer.
I did.
That launched a course of treatment that would span more than two years. The time is finally drawing to a close. When it’s done, this blog will talk about the experience.