2007-02-15

The Pneumonia Angels

At the bottom of the big plastic bin, where we store our Christmas decorations, are two little ceramic angels. They're styled after those vomitous Precious Moments� figurines (which are up there with Sting, "gender-neutral" pronouns, and water chestnuts on my Stupid List). At the base of each angel is a flimsily embossed logo of a popular drugstore chain, followed by the year in which they were issued. These cut-rate cutesy-poo ornaments came into my possession many years ago, at a time which I can only describe as being very dark, indeed. I call them the "Pneumonia Angels" and even though they're completely out of place on my tree (which is usually festooned with sugar skulls and insane old glass ornaments from the 40's), I make sure that there's a place for them.

The year I got them was not a good one. I had been dumped in a spectacularly chickenshit way by someone in whom I'd placed a good deal of (misguided, as it turned out) trust. This threw me into galloping melancholia, and I was rather ill-equipped to deal with it. I "coped" by drinking a lot of Jim Beam and cheap merlot, not sleeping, and embarking entirely too quickly into a new relationship with a person that I can nicely describe as irredeemably fucked-up. It was a very emotionally abusive situation, but I clung to it in hopes that I could "fix" this as I clearly hadn't been able to "fix" the last relationship.

The mental and physical stress took its toll on me, and I ended up with walking pneumonia. I had never been so fuckin' sick before in my life (and my childhood was riddled with all kinds of freakish diseases) and I don't ever want to be that fuckin' sick again if I can help it. A course of antibiotics was in order, as well as some codeine-laced cough syrup to address the nasty post-infectious cough I had developed. When I went to get my prescriptions filled, barely able to keep my shit together as I was shivering and hacking away like some croupe-y Dickensian waif, the pharmacist offered me these stupid little angels. "They're free," he said. I looked at them, looked at him, and just started laughing.

Most of you know how things have ended up. It would be a number of years yet until I jettisoned that "coping mechanism" of drinking. Since I've started taking reasonably good care of myself I'm seldom sick. I try to surround myself with good people and my challenge of late is to not depend too much on these people to define who I am and how I feel about myself on any given day. I rely entirely too much on externals.

But the Pneumonia Angels are totems of sorts. I could never part with them, even though I saw recently that someone was pushing one on Ebay for $22. You can't put a price on "free."

lisamcc at 8:57 a.m.



1 comments so far
agreen
2007-02-15 12:43:42
good post. i'm curious what the angels look like-at first I thought you were for real calling them 'pneumonia angels'-like they were some tim burton creations...
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