Sagepaper

I just finished reading The Professor and the Mad Man by someone Winchester. It was excellent, I stayed up until 4:00 a couple of nights in a row with it. I was so engrossed in the book that I blew-off my husband, and also you, dear readers. It's not that I didn't have anything to write about either. I have several soap-boxes available to me right now.

So, I stayed up until four in the morning. All that extra time awake allowed for far more cigarettes than usual. My lungs are a bit frail after years of hard use. As anyone who knows me could have predicted, I got sick. My chronic bronchitis had already come back. Today I was having so much trouble breathing that I had to quit smoking again.

I've been trying recently, but not going even one day without cigarettes. I worked up to such a frenzy of smoking that the usual 14 mg patches I start with were ineffective. Also, stale-dated. Anyway, I have a 21mg patch on now. That and some acetylcholine have me sweating like a pig.

Sometimes I long for the days of the pneumonias that scarred my lungs. There is no better weight loss program I have ever found than pneumonia. It's not an exercise program, I assure you. The only self discipline required is forcing your self to drink clear fluids. Eating is difficult and unappealing. It is very difficult to arrange to swallow when you can not breathe.

Unfortunately, I am not a college student anymore. I cannot now afford to get that sick. We aggressively treat new infections when they pop-up. Shallow breathing and a good fever make for a state of mind that is not at all intolerable. I have a friend who used to get pneumonia a lot. For her, the first symptom was what she called a "pneumonia high": inadequate oxygen or something does give you this sort of ethereal altered state of consciousness.

It's bad news, though. I was too sick once to go to the hospital. I could barely breathe just staying still. Movement jostled the fluids in my lungs and made it very difficult to resume breathing. I couldn't drive myself to the hospital. Some friends asked if they could take me to the hospital. I told them no, the hospital was too far, I would have lost my breath for sure. The next day, they asked if they should call an ambulance. I was a bit delirious I guess. It seemed to me that an ambulance would be the same as them taking me, but it would cost more. I couldn't imagine bouncing around in the back of an ambulance all the way to the hospital.

That particular pneumonia was my worst. There are other stories from it, too. The thing is, I turned the corner on it and started to recover. I got to where I was doing well enough that a family friend (later to be my hubby) could take me out to dinner. He was in town, and wanted company. I was exhausted when we got to the Chinatown restaurant. I barely ate. A physician, he asked me a few questions. He could hear how bad my breathing was from where he sat. He wanted me to let him take me to the hospital.

I was too exhausted. I told him I was getting better. I need to rest. All the activity of the whole day -- dinner -- had me totally wrung-out. When we parted, he told me the error of my thinking. I had said no one dies of pneumonia anymore. First, that's not true. Plenty of people die each year. The point he made that got my attention, though, was that if I did not get medical treatment, I was no better off than someone with pneumonia in the 17th century.

The next day, he took me to the hospital. I was doing even better after a night's sleep. It was a long hard ride, though. When I got to the ER, they chewed me out for waiting so long to come in. They said if I had gotten any worse, they would have had to admit me and give me IV antibiotics. Worse? I felt almost well again!