Struck by Luck

No one can explain luck. Luck either lays its golden hand on your shoulder or coldly passes by. Paul "Buck" Fisher was not a lucky person. Never once in his entire life had he gotten something for nothing. He'd never won a single prize or met the girl of his dreams. He even had great difficulty finding an empty space in a large parking lot. Good fortune always seemed to be just beyond his grasp.

Life for Buck Fisher became a constant struggle. He had difficulty holding a job, and he was forced to live in dilapidated housing. Finally, desperate, he turned to a life of petty crime. He began by shoplifting, then moved on to stealing handbags and after several years graduated to armed robbery. But even then, luck evaded him. In his very first attempt at armed robbery, he tried to hold up a doughnut shop frequented by police officers. When Buck pulled his toy gun from his belt and announced, "This is a stickup," the five police officers in the shop drew their weapons. In a brief burst of gunfire, Buck Fisher was shot three times in the chest.

An ambulance raced him to the hospital, where surgeons labored six hours to save his life. And there, lying in a hospital operating room, Buck Fisher's luck finally changed!

One bullet had missed his heart by less than a millimeter. Had it been the width of a fingernail closer to his heart, he would have died instantly. While the surgeon was removing that bullet, he happened to notice a bulging aneurysm--a miniature balloon ready to burst--in the aorta leading from Fisher's heart. The surgeon performed a delicate resection, inserting a synthetic graft and eliminating the danger from the aneurysm.

Had Fisher not been shot in the failed robbery attempt, within a few days at most that aneurysm would have burst, killing him. Instead, the bypass saved his life, enabling Paul "Buck" Fisher to serve every single day of his twenty-five-year sentence. Luck had found Buck Fisher in the nick of time.