by Justice William W. Bedsworth

This will not be funny.

That may not come as a surprise to you. You may have concluded long ago that my ruminations on life in the legal profession are not funny. But this time I’m not even gonna try.

A not funny thing happened to me on my way to my last column deadline. The cosmos tried to take me out. Again.

The cosmos has tried to sing me back home before. In 1988, an aneurysm burst in my brain. It was a mycotic aneurysm caused by a blood infection, and survival for such aneurysms runs well below 50%, even today. I was lucky to make it to the hospital.

But repair of the aneurysm involved some pretty fancy surgery by a guy who’s now a nationally renowned brain surgeon. I came out of it with a little metal clip in my brain and a large scar on my head.

It was a very close call, and one I do not recommend, but it did enable me to refute the lawyers who called me brainless. I now had witnesses.

Unfortunately, the aneurysm had been caused by the migration through my bloodstream of bacteria, streptococcus viridans, which had also done a number on my heart before migrating to my brain

So in 1990, I flew to Oklahoma City for open heart surgery.

I flew to OK City because they needed to rearrange some valves and do a little transplantation,¹ and the best guy in the country for what I needed was there. I remember my first thought was, “If this guy’s so good, what’s he doing in Oklahoma City?” But as soon as I heard him talk, as soon as I heard the Panhandle in his voice, I knew the answer.

Oklahoma was home. He was so good he could do his work anywhere he wanted. He chose home. As I had.²

So I had some very complicated heart surgery. But now I had more witnesses. How many judges can provide witnesses to prove they have both a heart *and* a brain?

And the cosmos was 0 for 2. It had tried to recycle me twice and failed. I was down from nine lives to seven, but I was feeling pretty good about my odds. I was forty-three years old and feeling, in the words of Travis Tritt, “ten feet tall and bulletproof.”

Subsequent surgeries for a hernia and torn ligament didn’t change that. The hip replacement in 2009 reminded me that there were evil forces afoot,³ but I remained confident.

And when I left the hospital on my seventieth birthday after colon surgery, I was a little shaken but mostly just pleased to have more witnesses.⁴

All that changed again in May. The universe took another shot at my poor, embattled body.

I’ve seen the x-rays. My lumbar spine looked like Lombard Street. Arthritis had so collapsed my spine that my nerve roots were being compressed. My legs and arms were losing strength.

I was headed for paralysis.

So . . . yep, another surgery. They put in a bunch of rods and pins and my spine now looks less like Lombard Street and more like the Oakland Bay Bridge.

Between the metal clip in my brain, the wire in my breastbone, my titanium hip, and my surgical steel spine, I’m gonna set off metal detectors if I so much as drive by an airport.

But that’s not the full story. The cosmos showed up in the operating room wearing a hood and carrying a scythe. The Grim Reaper was taking practice swings.

After putting in all that Twenty-First Century spinal superstructure, the doctors couldn’t get me out of anesthesia. I wouldn’t wake up. There was a brain bleed.⁵

They had to move me to a different hospital and call in a neurosurgeon to come open up both sides of my skull and get the blood out to relieve the pressure on my poor, beleaguered brain. When I finally woke up, my entire family and a couple of close friends were arrayed around my bedside looking relieved.

Another swing and miss by the cosmos. That’s three, but, as I said, the cosmos is no longer playing by the rules. I’m not expecting it to give up.

So here I sit, in a big back brace, waiting for my next physical therapy appointment where they will continue trying to teach me to do things I last learned to do when I was two.

Rehab is a bitch. It always is. But you have to do it or you might as well not have had the surgery.

My wife put it well, “You can either lean into being a frail old man or you can do the rehab.”

I’m doing the rehab.

As Stevie Winwood would say, “I’ll be back in the high life again.”

And I said all that so I could say this: I am living proof of the power of modern medicine. I’ve been playing on the medical equivalent of house money for almost four decades. You give these folks half a chance, they can get you through.

But in the meantime, you gotta enjoy yourself. You get no guarantees. You may have thirty years left, you may have thirty minutes. Every day is a gift; that’s why they call it the present.⁶

So get out there and live. Give the kind of dedication you’ve been giving your clients to your family. Go on vacation. Learn to play the piano. Teach your granddaughter to fish.

Whatever it is that lights you up, do it. The cosmos has been very unlucky with me. Every bad hand it’s dealt me has been reparable. Don’t count on successfully drawing to as many inside straights as I have. Walk away from the table long enough to have some fun.

BEDS NOTES

1. God bless the Oklahoman who willed his heart valves to medicine—and me. Needless to say, I now have a donor card in my wallet.
2. I’m a SoCal kid. I never wanted to be anywhere else. So I came home after law school jobless but determined I was not going anywhere else. Shallow roots give you flexibility, but if your roots run deep, you should listen to them.
3. The cosmos has minions.
4. They took out a foot of my colon, making me, by actual measurement, less full of sh** than any other judge in the state.
5. We don’t know why. The cosmos is no longer playing by the rules. It’s just making sh** up.
6. Thank you, Ted Lasso.

William W. Bedsworth is an Associate Justice of the California Court of Appeal. He writes this column to get it out of his system. A Criminal Waste of Space won Best Column in California in 2018 from the California Newspaper Publishers Association (CNPA). And look for his latest book, Lawyers, Gubs, and Monkeys, through Amazon, Barnes and Noble, and Vandeplas Publishing. He can be contacted at william.bedsworth@jud.ca.gov.