Pneumonia and Other Dangers

The best thing that ever happened to me was when my mother almost died.

Don’t get me wrong; she’s a fabulous mom. She taught me about literature, art, elitism, and caffeine addiction. I owe everything to her. However, she never let me watch TV, so as a five year old, it was hard to see her as anything but menacing.

 While my friends were allowed to fry their eyeballs out on Disney Chanel, my mom would feel the computer to see if I had been using it behind her back.

If the moniter was warm, consequences were dire.

But things were about to change…

The anger that my mother had towards mind-numbing entertainment had manifested in her lungs. After a week of excruciating fatigue, she went to the hospital to find that she had developed a severe case of pneumonia  She could die if left untreated for even a few more days, and she was placed in the ICU for a week.

Distraught, my father racked his brain for ways to entertain my brothers and me. He went to Blockbuster and rented up all of the Pokemon vhs tapes he could find. He also grabbed some obesity-sized bins of candy and cheesey chemicals. After all, his children needed to eat.  

We spent the ensuing days in a blissful hurricane of Japanimation and corn syrup. I didn’t care if my mother ever came back.

But she had other plans.

My mother had been fighting for her life with pure maternal love, vowing to make it through her illness so that she could be with her children again.

Upon her return from the hospital, she expected to be welcomed by the proper and loving cherubs that illness had torn away.

But she found something much darker.

We had gone rabid. It was like Lord of the Flies with processed food.

She was not welcome on the island, and I let this be known.

Years later, I would be overrun with guilt for my vile behavior.

But in the meantime, I was just happy that she was still on bed rest,

And couldn’t get up to check the computer. 

By Olivia