Ahem

What's ridiculous is that I'm still coughing. More than two weeks after the onset of a cold or flu or whatever it was, I am still hacking. Not all the time, but there are occasions when I'll start and won't seem to be able to stop. Like right now.

And then when I have these coughing fits, I will occasionally cough so hard that it feels like something explodes inside my brain. I don't actually believe that my head will spontaneously explode. But I certainly feel like it occasionally.

Maybe I should look into getting a lung transplant. I'm sure there are people on some list who are more deserving: cancer patients, people suffering from emphysema, etc. Are lung transplants even possible? I think I saw an episode of House recently where a patient had complications from some kind of lung transplant. But that is a fictional television show.

But let me ask this, how many of those more deserving people awaiting new lungs really deserve them? I mean, who's to say they didn't spend their entire adult lives addicted to cigarettes? In those cases, they made their choices. At some point, they chose to put that first cigarette to their lips and light up.

I've never even thought about trying to smoke. But I guess I'm just as guilty. I did walk into the bathroom several times in high school, knowing full well that there would be kids in there smoking. Sometimes the smoke was so thick that it seriously hindered visibility. But I had to go really bad!

And those guys would just look at me like I was the latest narc to walk the halls of Patrick Henry. I wasn't a narc. I was much more afraid of the consequences of telling on those kids than I was of second hand smoke. Did we even know about second hand smoke in those days? Late 90s, I'm sure the phrase had been coined at that point.

If you're still hanging on to my every word and have stuck around past my incoherent rambling, I conclude by saying that I've stopped coughing now. Maybe I just needed to think things through a bit. Mind over matter my friends. Mind over matter.