Do you align the odds of life in your favor?
8th July 2014 · 0 Comments
By Fr. Jerome LeDoux
Contributing Columnist
“If you have had chickenpox, you already have the shingles virus inside you.” After hearing the TV advisory one more time that one in three people will contract shingles, I finally decided to do something about it. On May 26, I called a pharmacy to make sure that they had shingles vaccine on hand, then went posthaste and got the vaccination.
I had watched two friends in particular suffer the acute pains of shingles, agonizing over blisters forming over parts of their bodies with painful sensitivity to the slightest touch, and with a general malaise that can go on for weeks, months, even a couple of years or beyond. Putting myself in their shoes, I realized that I could hardly live a productive life with shingles in play.
After one has had chickenpox, the virus lies inactive in nerve tissue near one’s spinal cord and brain. Years later, the virus may reactivate as shingles. Although the shingles vaccine is no guarantee that one will not get the affliction, it stacks the odds high in one’s favor.
Shingles is known as posthepatic neuralgia (PHN), the result of the shingles virus damaging the nerves of the skin. It affects 1 million people in the U.S each year. Most recover from shingles, but the pain does not go away for 50 percent of those over 60 who have not been treated. It can last for months, years, or even the rest of their lives. Who likes those odds?
Priced at $229.00, the shingles vaccine was covered by my insurance. However, even if the vaccine were not covered by insurance, the mental relief of knowing that I can live the remainder of my life with very low probability that the chickenpox virus will ever be reactivated in me is more than worth the money. The alternative of pain and inconvenience is not an option.
Aligning the odds of life in your favor has endless applications. Tony Gwynn might have told you that baseball killed him because he first began to chew at rookie ball in Walla Walla, Washington. So paranoid that his swing would fall to pieces overnight, he would dip smokeless tobacco to take the edge off. He had the same morning habit for years, brushing his teeth, firing in a dip, then going through a can and a half of Skoal a day. What a repulsive thought!
Next to his locker in the baseball clubhouse lay the cup he used to spit into. Unhappily, one day at home, his young son, Anthony, thought that cup was full of juice and took a sip. “It was gross!” the child grimaced. From that moment on, Anthony vowed he would never chew.
Unfortunately, it was too late for Tony. “I was addicted,” he told his closest friends. He would sneak out of his house late at night – “like a criminal,” he said – to buy his tobacco at a convenience store. If his wife, Alicia, had known, she would have socked him harder than he hit the baseball. She wanted him to quit, begged him to quit, and threatened to leave him if he didn’t quit. Alas, he knew she would not ever leave him. He tried sunflower seeds, bubble gum, pumpkin seeds and synthetic chew, but baseball wasn’t baseball without the real stuff. “I’m a tobacco junkie,” the Hall Of Famer would confide to his those nearest to him.
Tragically, Tony was a tobacco junkie no more after the dirty juice gave him cancer of the salivary gland that was detected by the doctor in 2010. In pain and misery he fought the dread disease until it had destroyed his immune system and took him from us on June 16 at 54.
Shooting the baseball nearly at will wherever he wanted to drive it, Tony spent endless hours in the batting cage, pounding the ball between shortstop and third base where a convenient hole was usually left by the infielders. That was his bread and butter location, although he would occasionally exert his 200-pound body and drive the ball over the fence – 135 times to be exact.
Incredibly, Tony struck out a mere 424 times in 20 seasons. A 15-time All-Star, he had a 338 career batting average, won eight batting championships, had 3,141 hits, won seven Silver Slugger Awards, won five Gold Gloves as an outfielder. He is rated among the several-best hitters ever.
Number 19, Mr. Padre, Mr. San Diego, alias Captain Video – referencing constant study of videos of his swing – was multiple times better as a person than as a batsman. Turning down richer contracts to go elsewhere, he settled for relatively piddling pay as a San Diego Padre. The mutual love between him, his team and San Diego cannot be described or measured in words.
Arizona Diamondbacks reliever Addison Reed, who had played for coach Gwynn at San Diego State University, told the Major League moguls that he quit baseball when he heard of Tony’s death. “It’s one of those things where I’ve done it for so long it’s just become a habit, a really bad habit,” Reed said of using smokeless tobacco. “It was something I always told myself I would quit, like next month, and the next thing you know it’s been six or seven years.”
Finally jolted awake by his friend Tony’s death, Addison Reed began to align the odds of life on his side. Are we wise enough to follow suit in our personal confrontations with alcohol or any other drugs, with foods that we know cause high blood pressure, high cholesterol, diabetes, arthritis, gout, cancer and cardiac disease? Are we serious about aligning the odds of life on our side by ingesting only the foods, drinks and substances that enhance our health and well-being?
This article originally published in the July 7, 2014 print edition of The Louisiana Weekly newspaper.
