I Am Curious (Blu), Part II: Poor Bobo

What was my point again? Besides fishing around for scraps of sympathy and attention among whatever remaining readership we have, because TRUST ME I've already overfished my IRL friends for sympathy and attention, even going so far as to tackily put up medical trauma pics on fucking Facebook in a blatant gesture of exhibitionistic self-pity. And besides using my near death experience* as an occasion to turn Feyfriends into even more of a self-indulgent one-man "personal" blog than I already have.

Oh right, my point: SMOKING KILLS!

I'm not a thoracic pathologist so I can't say for sure if it was the Blus, the American Spirits I had started sneaking again, or my previous uninterrupted 17 year stretch as a smoker--or if, as is certainly possible (I GUESS) it was none of the above--that caused it to happen, but I can say that just as I was starting to get cozy with inhaling carcinogens on a daily basis again my RIGHT LUNG FUCKING EXPLODED. It's called a spontaneous pneumothorax, and the experience of it--the wheezing, shortness of breath, and stabbing chest pain--is pretty scary and hurts pretty bad, but is nowhere near as scary or painful as the experience of it not healing itself (which it typically does) and having to have it treated surgically.

But I'm going to back away from my initial plan to lead you through it beat by icky beat, because I'm lazy and I've told this story some forty times too many already and that's not the point of this blog anyway. But re: scary, painful, and gross here's a picture of the chest tubes I had in for four days following surgery:

This was moments before I had the tubes removed, so you are spared the sight of the reddish-yellow fluid that filled these tubes for the first three post-surgery days.

ANYWAY! Today was my last check-up with my thoracic surgeon (who by the way was totally hot) and although he said that since he only took off the top part of my RIGHT lung my left lung is at pretty high risk for another one of these things--so I may have to repeat the entire six week ordeal at some terrifyingly impossible-to-predict moment in the future--it's over for now!

And as the perfect little coda, as I was leaving the parking structure at Cedars Sinai for what I hope truly is the last time I got turned around, fortuitously ending up in a little cul-de-sac near the exits where the following sight greeted me.

IT WAS ALL WORTH IT.

*(It wasn't even remotely a near-death experience.)