Choices...

An eye for an eye

A tooth for a tooth

Blood for blood

- Five Finger Death Punch

The chain in those handcuffs

is high-tensile steel.

It'd take you ten minutes

to hack through it with this. (Brandishes saw)

Now, if you're lucky...you could hack through your ankle

in five minutes…

Go….

- Mad Max

As Survivors, we are sometimes faced with forced splits in the road. Paths, which are tempting. Paths that play the odds, the percentages and the statistics. Eve had her devil and so do we.

Nothing is guaranteed. Doctors will ask you to put your chips on an uncertain future. It’s a simple two-step scientific formula – remove the disease and remove where the disease lives.

Take out a lung for you have two. Take away more of the leg than needed just to be sure.

It’s a sort of macabre laboratory that we live in. The microscope light is white hot.

Perhaps a mole doesn’t look quite right. A scan shows a shadow. A cough has lingered a few weeks too long.

Every grain of sand can’t be counted yet every grain must be looked at.

Then the devil smiles with a deal. We are told that certain percentages go up if we commit ourselves to the invasive. It may be a stronger, longer dose of drug therapy, or a more potent barrage of radiation. It could be a removal of a limb, an organ or for some, a soul.

Whatever the devil calls it, we consider it. Many shake their heads in wonder, but many, thankfully don’t have to choose.

The key here is that Survivors are never quite in control from Day 1. Once a door is ajar, even for a moment, we leap at the chance to take back what was stolen from us. Even if that means being subjected to science experiments.

As a child, my parents were faced with a decision. To use a war analogy, it would be akin to using a precise minimal strike strategy or simply laying waste to the land.

Somewhere in there, madness and reason battle with our lives as the prize.

It is our roulette. Hit the right number and perhaps you win another day.