Playing along with "tag"

As if this blog didn't already have enough random thoughts spread liberally throughout, Saint has tagged me for a "8 random things about me" thing-ee.

I guess I should feel honoured that, after 4 years of blogging, someone finally tagged me for something. Who knows, that long awaited $100,000 payment for posting some information that has changed some rich eccentric's life may soon be on its way too. (See that Paypal button? I don't even know if it works.)

Anyhoo, as they say in the classics:

1. I had my appendix out at about age 8. As a result, I knew that nurses shouldn't let a drip empty so that air gets into your vein, as (so I was told) you could die from an air bubble in your blood stream. Which leads to:

2. A couple of years later, while on holiday one Christmas in a country town in Victoria, I got a bout of gastro and was taken to a very doddery old doctor. He decided to give me an injection to quell the vomiting. When filling the syringe, I could see that he had sucked up some air along with the medicine from the ampoule. I expected him to invert the needle and squeeze the air out, as I had seen doctors and nurses always do, and which I understood to be rather important due to the potentially fatal result of injecting someone with air.

He didn't. He just took my arm and gave me the injection, air and all. OK, it wasn't a huge amount of air, but he emptied the syringe, including the bubbly bits at the end.

It seemed to me that there was a distinct possibility that I was about to die, and in a pretty pathetic sort of way if it was due to the simple carelessness of a doctor who should have retired 10 years earlier. I didn't say anything, and left the surgery, whereupon my my mother asked me if I was alright. She said that as soon as I had the injection, I had gone a ghastly shade of pale, and injections had never been a bother to me before.

I explained the story to her. She understood my shock, but after sitting down and still being alive 10 minutes later, it seemed my brush with death would pass.

However, I still occasionally wonder if there is a bubble lurking in me somewhere.

3. I highly recommend Victorinox steak knives. A sharper steak knife surely does not exist.

4. As a young adult I once got sick on home made Harvey Wallbangers. Last time I checked, I still feel queasy at the smell of Galliano.

5. I have eaten fish sperm (well, fish seminal vessels, to be precise.) Hey it was in Japan, OK?

6. The most famous person I have ever been physically close to in real life: probably Michael Collins, Apollo 11 astronaut, in the bookshop at the Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. (I think he worked at the Museum at the time.)

7. I once landed in a glider while accidentally leaving the landing gear up. (I lost interest in learning how to fly them soon after that.)

8. After getting over the shock of having Sister Lawrence (the scariest Irish nun in the school) as my Grade 1 and Grade 2 teacher, I was routinely pretty well behaved in school. But in (I think) Grade 4, we had a new lay teacher, who on the first day mis-interpretted something I did and instantly decided I was in fact a trouble maker. No, no, no, I tried to say: I am one of the good boys. The injustice and novelty of the situation did not last long: within a week she was hit by a bus on the way to school and died.

Maybe this is why, ever since, I have felt all of my opinions are directly vindicated by God.*

I suspect anyone I want to tag has probably already done this. Caz?

* a not entirely serious suggestion.