Have a moment for Broadcast, over a year later and still, awwwww maaaannnnn… I didn’t really vibe with them when they were indie cool in the early 2000s (worst time period ever fashion/music/culture/political climate/etc wise a.k.a. when I was a sullen, depressed teenager in the lame suburbs, can we at least agree that it was worse than the 90s). But then when I started to, it was too late for more and too late to see them live. So sad.
What relatively healthy, relatively well-off person dies of pneumonia at age 42 in the modern Western world? It’s shitty, maybe even preventable, but it happens. Shit, I worked as a nursing assistant for 2 years at a small local hospital while I was in college and it was mostly pretty terrible and I saw stuff like this. One of the worst things was this brilliant woman in her early 30s with a 2 year old daughter and a loving husband who was dying of stomach cancer. She was just so…angry. As I imagine I would be. I couldn’t even begin to understand what she was dealing with. I was 19 at the time. I’m nearing 25 now and still think about her from time to time. There was nothing fair about it. Nothing she had done wrong. There’s this weird perception, like some cultural old wives tales hangover, that you have to do something really really bad to get seriously ill, and often that’s not the case. This woman had no vices, was not a smoker, not a drinker and yet she wouldn’t make it to 33. Fucked. Utterly fucked. I couldn’t imagine what I’d see as a doctor or a nurse. (Nevermind ruin my 20s in med school, thanks but I can do that myself for free by being a depressed slacker while deferring my undergrad repayments indefinitely). That was a pretty wild reminder that your health is everything. Sometimes there’s nothing you can do to prevent things from going sour. I don’t really know if I’m advocating ‘viewing yr body as a temple’ or whatever other new age guilt-tripping shit that gets passed around in the wider arena of discussing the body politic, or whatever, but man… The only thing I could offer this woman was a cup of bland, generic, no-sodium added (by that I mean, basically no flavor added) chicken broth. She took it and drank it. I never saw her again. Some old man with gallbladder issues or something was in her room the next shift I had. Often, when they’re young, this means they got better and went home, but I’m sure this wasn’t the case here.
I’ve been laid up the past couple of days with a few gnarly ailments and have been feeling like death (of course now I certainly don’t as I’ve been able to stomach solid food and two glasses of sangria). Yesterday I could barely even stand and had to go to the ER. And today, straight chill in’… Feels indulgent, but necessary.
Anyfuck, not making sense anymore. Lovely song. R.I.P. Trish.
