A Universe-Splitting Nine Lives

 I got off to a rocking, rocky start...

1. At Age 1, I pulled a frying pan full of hamburgers off the stove onto my head. I still have a massive scar to this date.
2. When I was 10, I fell out of the very top of a 35-foot-tall magnolia tree, crashed through limbs that slowed my descent, splatted belly first onto the huge horizon last limb, where I then held on momentarily before dropping the last 8 feet to the ground.
3. When I was 15, after hauling ass at around a hundred miles an hour and leaving a friend on a slower bike in the dust, I wrecked my motorcycle in a curve. I had started to brake and gear down aggressively as I approached the bend. But the dirt road was one-laned and had soft shoulders on both sides, and I lost control when my front tire left the hard-packed right rut. I basically mired into the soft, sandy dirt and was pulled toward the ditch, where I impacted the bank at about 40 miles an hour. Out of control, I went up and down the 10-foot-tall bank, until finally laying the bike on its side. Motocross bikes are supposed to cut off when you release the throttle, but my Suzuki's engine was still running, and it was attempting to destroy my leg with the tire and its spokes. Luckily, I was able to immediately wrench my leg free.
4. On that same dirt road when I was 15, I was riding in a car that flipped.
5. When I was 15, I was climbing and nearing the top of a 20-foot-tall cliff under a train trestle, when I started to lose my grip, to be saved only by the strong arm of a friend who had just made it over the top. Had he not been able to grab me when he did, I would have fallen backwards and my head likely would have splatted onto one of the trestle's concrete columns.
6. When I was 20, I fell down an open manhole, as I ran wide-open on the sidewalk in the rain, my eyeglasses misted over and fogged up, carrying the bank's backup data tapes. Both elbows struck on either side of the hole on the sidewalk. My legs dangled in midair. I never knew the depth of that manhole. I was able to hoist myself out of the hole and continue on to my destination: the jail and dispatcher's office, where we kept a safe.
7. When I was 23, I was putting decking on a roof when I lost my balance and fell down a rafter, catching myself with my leg like it was a monkey's tail, just before falling through the rafters, where I would have plummeted 15 feet, head first to a plywood floor.
8. When I was 23, I stepped on a 4x8-foot sheet of plywood decking, believing that it had already been nailed down. Instead, it shot out from under me because the Liquid Nail had just been applied, and due to it being a 105-degree summer day, the hot adhesive had turned to grease. Momentarily, I was frozen in midair, and very much like some cartoon character, time had stopped. I watched my coworkers as they looked at me as if they were watching a man go to his death. However, I was somehow able to evaluate the situation in those milliseconds before gravity took over... and only then did I plummet downward toward the floor joists. There was a tiny, 16-inch gap between them. If only I could turn sideways a bit as I fell, was my thought. And miraculously the bulky, breakable body parts sailed cleanly through the opening, unscathed, and I was able to grab onto the joists somehow with my hands and legs, so that I didn't end up under the house.
9. When I was 25, at about 25 miles per hour, my buddy accidentally ran into the back of my bicycle with his bike. This threw me off balance.  I crossed up the steering. The bike abruptly stopped, throwing me forward. I flew like Superman over the handlebars, clearing the bike perfectly, but splatting onto the pavement in front of an oncoming 18-wheeler. I laid there for a couple of seconds, stunned, before jumping up and hauling my bicycle out of the highway.

Now stage-4 prostate cancer has me in its sights. Does the nine-lives law apply, and I just shut down like a machine getting switched off, or do I keep motoring along like Schrodinger's cat in its unlikeliest branched universe?