Nicky's Numbers
I grew up sick. Not the kind of sick where you miss a week of school and bounce back. The kind where your parents sit in a doctor's office and are told not to expect their child to reach adulthood.
I was born with a severe heart condition. Hospitals were my childhood. I was always the youngest person in the cardiologist's waiting room, and I have yet to see anyone younger. While other kids worried about homework and recess, I was learning what it meant to have a body that didn't work the way it was supposed to.
But here's the thing. I loved school. I loved learning. Math, science fiction, puzzles, anything that made my brain work harder than my heart had to. I was the kid who actually enjoyed Math-A-Thon. When I discovered Arithmancy in Harry Potter, I went looking for the real version and found numerology. That was it for me. Numbers became my thing. I just didn't tell a lot of people about it yet.
Despite every prediction about my future (or lack of one), I kept going. Two master's degrees. Then a PhD. The kid who wasn't supposed to grow up earned a doctorate. I still think about that sometimes.
My heart kept getting weaker. In 2018, a cardiologist gave me the final answer: complete heart failure within two years. Not a candidate for transplant. That was supposed to be the end. I went to get a second opinion at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center. After over a year of testing, I asked the one question I had been carrying with me: "Would a transplant improve my quality of life?"
She said yes.
I sobbed the entire way out of the hospital. Months later, I was listed for a heart transplant. Most people never make it off the waiting list.
My phone rang. "We found you a heart."
Everything changed.
After the transplant, recovery wasn't a straight line. My body started fighting the new heart. Organ rejection. It's one of the biggest risks after a transplant, and I was in the thick of it.
During one of those visits to Cedars-Sinai, I found an oracle card deck scattered on the ground outside the hospital. Just thrown there. I wasn't really into tarot at the time. Numbers were my language, not cards. But a close friend was into it, so I stopped to look.
One card was face up.
It was The Heart.
I took a photo and kept walking. Something about that moment settled over me. A calm I couldn't explain. Shortly after, I was told the rejection had cleared.
After the transplant, everything sharpened. The numbers I had always noticed became impossible to ignore.
37 had been my number since childhood. I could never explain why. It just kept appearing, in places that felt too specific to be random. After the transplant, it showed up even more. On clocks, receipts, addresses, page numbers. Always 37.
333 was the other one. Most people associate it with the trinity, and that's valid. But for me, 333 always felt like a cycle. An ending becoming a beginning becoming an ending. My old heart, my donor's gift, my new life. Three phases. Three turns of the wheel. That's why you'll notice the 333 page on this site reads a little differently than other sources. It's personal.
I finished my doctorate during the pandemic while the world was on pause. I rescued a Siberian Husky who was four hours from being put down. She was just a baby, barely a year old, not given a chance because of irresponsible owners. Now she's thriving. Four hours she had left. I had a second chance at life because of someone else's generosity. The least I could do was pass that along.
I'm a PhD who works as a director by day. I live in California with two huskies and more books than shelf space. I'm a numbers person, a rune reader, a history nerd who dreams of Road Scholars expeditions and National Geographic journeys. I believe in science, in supporting the arts, in research, and in trying to leave things a little better than you found them.
A lot of things in this world are out of our control. I know that better than most. But we can control how we pay attention. We can control what we do with the signs we're given.
That's what this site is. A place to pay attention. To look at the numbers that keep finding you and ask what they might be trying to say.
I won't sugarcoat it for you. I won't bury the meaning under filler. And I won't pretend every message from the universe is a warm hug. Some of them are wake-up calls. You deserve to know either way.
So. Who is St. Nicholas?
Just someone paying attention. Same as you.
— Nicky