“You’ll have to bury this with me.”

This is what my superstitious grandmother told the family when we gifted her an opal pendant necklace.

Opals, she counseled, are bad luck for anyone not born in October. As she was the only October birthday in the family, none of us could take possession of the necklace after her death.

So we buried her with it.

I share this story because I want you to know where I’m coming from. I don’t believe superstitions are real. I don’t.

But opening an umbrella in the house feels risky. And breaking a mirror? What am I? A Rolling Stone? Am I going to live life on the edge like that?

No. What I am is a superstition agnostic – I don’t believe in superstitions, but I practice superstitious doctrine.

Just in case.

I greeted February from my third emergency room in four months.

None of those visits were for me.

With no other reason for the bad luck coming to mind, I realized this streak of bad luck had to be the result of a violated superstition.

According to The Wall Street Journal, it’s normal to blame bad luck in situations like mine. Blaming bad luck makes you feel like you’ve regained some control over the situation.

I love having control over the situation.

I wasn’t sure how to rectify a violated superstition intent on punishing my transgression with successively worse emergency room visits. But a chance encounter in Center City changed that.

I stumbled across a store selling bundles of white sage. Burning sage would probably fix everything. Right?

This is what three emergency room visits had done to me. I had shifted from superstitious agnostic to the Pope of magical thinking. Great.

What I have learned since burning that sage is either things were supposed to be a lot worse, or burning sage is like asking for a wish from the evil djinn in Wishmaster.

You’re not missing anything if you haven’t seen it. Let’s just say the evil djinn is a real jerk when it comes to granting wishes. A plea for beauty turns a character into a mannequin. That sort of thing.

A week after burning the sage, my husband tested positive for covid. He had to isolate himself from the rest of the family for five days.

I banished him to our bedroom, Girl Scout cookies and Ozark in tow.

I slept on the sofa.

I suggested my husband – triple vaccinated and therefore not all that sick – isolate at our family cabin. He could get outside. Enjoy himself.

And I could have my bed back.

He tripped on a low stone wall while at the cabin. He was limping when he arrived home.

He once walked around for three days with a collapsed lung. A stiff leg is nothing. A little ibuprofen would loosen it up.

He hobbled to our bedroom. A few minutes later, he shot me a text.

“You have to see this.”

A text like that, after my husband and I had been separated for five days? Yeah. I put my dog in the yard. I brushed my teeth.

I found my husband in our bed, stripped down to his underwear. But brushing my teeth had been a waste of time.

His left thigh was three times the size of his other thigh.

So that was how I wound up in my fourth emergency room in four months. For a third person.

Crouching to help him dress, I asked him to lift his leg so I could get his pants on. He pointed out if he could lift his leg, we wouldn’t need a hospital.

“Sorry,” I said. “Wrong infirm guy.” Because when I dress my dad for the hospital, instructions to lift his leg so I can get his pants on are usually followed.

My husband is on crutches, and since most of his blood leaked into his left thigh, he’s looking a bit gray. He’s set up camp in – yes, our bedroom – with more Girl Scout cookies and Ozark.

And I’m back on the sofa.

So. Did the sage keep things from being worse? Or does the sage just have a wicked sense of humor?

NBC News says a lot of superstition comes from religious doctrine or plain old common sense. Sometimes, it’s the mind taking command – if something bad happens on Friday the 13th, our brain just says, “well, duh, of course something bad happened today!”

Knowing the run of bad luck in my house has nothing to do with opals, umbrellas, or sage is weirdly liberating. I’m just here for the ride. Does tomorrow hold another hospital visit? A cascade of water? A medication reaction so bad your temperature spikes to 101 degrees and your son makes everyone Oreo milkshakes for dinner?

That one was me. One of the most painful twelve hours of my life.

Will I hold onto my superstition? I don’t know. I’ve always had good luck on Friday the 13^th thanks to a birthday or two on that unlucky day.

And my daughter is the sole October baby in the family.

Who has an opal of her own.

That’s missing.

So we know where the bad luck came from.