Cigarettes are cool

My mom's been smoking since she was about 12 and she's never gotten any cool merchandise like a leather jacket or even a lighter. She's never gotten lung cancer like her best friend. All my mom's ever gotten from cigarettes are a few minutes of "relaxation" per day, asthma, chronic obstructive pulmonary disorder, chronic bronchitis and an inability to breathe when the air gets cold, or she gets a cold or she gets the flu or if there's too many allergens in the air.

My sister called me from NY today to tell me that my mom's in the ICU - she couldn't breathe again. They ran some tests and she has some Type-A level flu, they had to send out the samples to find out exactly which strain but swine flu isn't out of the question at this point. She's a city school teacher after all and while not attempting to be racist, (so if you're going to call me one f off), low income, uneducated people aren't the best at hygiene. I'm not looking to point fingers in that direction, I'm just saying, there's not much we can do to insulate her from that. The fact that her immune system is already shot to hell is where my anger starts.

The last time I spoke with my sister, about 15 minutes ago (3:30am east coast time) my mom was still "laboring to breathe on her own". A five dollar phrase that just means at this point her body can't perform the simple and basic function of taking in oxygen on its own, so they've had to intubate her.

I want someone to blame, I need someone to yell at that this is happening...again. I want to yell at her, blame her for not quitting any of the times my sister and I have pleaded with her to. For not sticking with it after kicking the habit for a few weeks or a month. I want to grab her by the shoulders and shake the shit out of her and cry and scream and ask her why the hell she has to be the most stubborn person I've ever met. But she doesn't respond to that.

Of all the things I've learned in my life and possibly ever will learn, how to get through to my mom isn't one of them. We're 165 degree opposites. We can't be 180 because that would be too simple, just do the exact opposite. We're off in two separate worlds that have few intersections and their mostly trivial and superficial.

I don't know how to get her to stop and I lazily keep thinking and hoping that each successive hospital visit will do the trick. She comes back and says all the right things, like she were A-Rod, but it doesn't last. I need to get through to her because you can't go to the hospital 4-5 times a year, every year, unable to breathe. It's a numbers game, eventually it'll catch up to you, like it did for my grandmother and she took much better care of herself. She was the toughest woman we've ever known and one stupid time things didn't go right. That's all it takes.

This is one of my favorite shirts (that's not me wearing it though - I have a Coach bag). I bought it almost for the sole purpose of pissing my mom off. I told her I bought it because of her. I think I need to send her one of her own.