Why am I not smoking. Because I had a cold which went immediately into my chest. I don’t normally get that. But this time I did. And the very same day I was realizing the coughing fits were increasing and I was feeling distinctly unwell, unbeknownst to me my little brother was in an ER in Massachusetts with a rapidly developing atypical pneumonia.

Turns out little brother has a MRSA pneumonia. It’s scary. He wasn’t sick before this. Just BANG, MRSA pneumonia. He is HIV positive but his T cells are pretty decent. Perhaps they’ve been looking at the wrong T cells my sister the lab assistant says. I don’t know my T cell from my B cell, so I’ll just wait for my brother’s next HIV update, which won’t be for another month or so.

Regardless of where his immune system is at, he is damned sick right now and I’m his health care proxy. Moreover, I’m his sister. I want to be able to be there, I mean really physically there. It sucks to be that sick and alone. So not wanting my chest cold to turn into something which would lay me out in bed for a week, I decided I’d try not to smoke.

Thus far, it’s been 8 days since I had a cigarette. Sometimes I really want one. Then I start coughing and this shit comes up, or I call my brother and hear him gasping into the phone like he just took two flights of stairs in three leaps and I don’t want one so much.

He’s doing better. Not well but much better than he was. He transfered out of Babyfarm Suburban Hospital on Wednesday of last week, he came off the O2 Friday, and the team who’s covering him over at Man’s Best Hospital had been talking of sending him home early this coming week until the pleural fluid culture came back today. We don’t know what’s in it yet. We only know the 4th year popped in with just enough information to make my brother uneasy and to confirm my call that this was the start of the Discharge Cha-Cha (Let’s go! cha-cha-cha Woops no! cha-cha-cha)

Odds are he’ll be recovering down here at Chez Hygeian if he’s discharged this week since Nurse Mom went ahead with her elective surgery on Friday, recovery from which doesn’t allow much in the way of ambulation for something like two or three weeks. And Mr. Nurse Mom is an overgrown baby who’s ability to take care of even just himself, the pets, and Nurse Mom while she recovers is quite doubtful.

So I figured it’d be best to at least TRY to keep up the nonsmoking. God knows my brother’s not going to need smoke in those beat up lungs.