{look upon my works, ye mighty}

So, I'm suffering from severe bronchitis, apparently brought on by having three plane flights within a week that were all longer than twelve hours, and aggravated by lack of treatment.

The word 'severe' was the pick of the doctor who made the house call today, not mine. My parents are taking me to get my chest X-rayed tomorrow to see how much fluid is in my lungs since I'm having trouble breathing. I ended up having to use my sister's oxygen machine today and the doctor is making me inhale Sultanol with salt water. My head was in my mother's lap as I lay on the couch and did that.

This is how my sister felt before she died. She also had bronchitis first before it turned into pneumonia and sent her into cardiac arrest. She lay on that same couch, she had the same treatment (but she couldn't swallow the pills so they were injected into her feeding tube in her stomach instead), and she struggled to breathe just like I am right now. She had a fever, I have a fever.

But I can tell my parents what hurts, I can tell them that I need oxygen and I can't breathe and my chest hurts. She couldn't do any of that. She couldn't even tell them to change her diapers whereas I can get up and go to the bathroom on my own.

Still, I'm sick and hurting in a similar manner to how she was. So that's good. That's something. I don't really want to get better. I want to get pneumonia (I had it once before and survived) and hurt like that too. Maybe a cardiac arrest, I don't know. That might be going too far.

But I'm an atheist and I can't believe that anything I do will make anything better for her now that she's dead. All I can do right now is be sick and be a replacement for my sister (my mother likes holding me on her lap the way she held my sister, she wants me to miss the spring term of college and go back in fall), and wait to see if I get better.

I half want to, because I hate being sick. But I half want it to descend into pneumonia so that I'll know what her final hours were like, what they felt like, how much pain she was in when she died. I wasn't there. I was in America, on the wrong continent. This is the closest I can get to having stood by her and watched her final hours the way my parents did.

I think this is the first time I've ever been sick and okay with it.