I don’t think yesterday would have been the day that I had ended up choking if I hadn’t been laid off recently.

I visit St. Petersburg once or twice a week, but almost never on a Monday. Due to the fact that I had no work the next day, I went to hang out with a friend who’s going through a tough time right now. He wasn’t home when I arrived, so I stopped by CVS and did the thoughtful thing and grabbed a card. Filled it out, slipped it through the door…and went to Taco Hell for a late night meal.

2AM on Tuesday morning, the mix of taco sauce, hydrocodone, and Advair was enough to loosen my lungs up and upset my stomach. Then I coughed up the Nerf ball. I guess it had been decided that I should leave the world. Or maybe it was time to teach me a lesson of some sort? Or maybe I just needed to get rid of the thing and it happened to happen just then.

If it had been decided that I should leave the world, then somebody’s mind changed while I was choking and let me live. What made the mind change? Am I supposed to do something in return for that? To whom do I do that “something”?

What lesson was I supposed to learn? The only thing I learned from it was that it was probably time to make a living will just in case something happened to me.

I personally think that it was fate (as I don’t believe in destiny). The insurance from the company that I was with runs out on Friday, June 30th. I would probably have never done what was needed to cough up that Nerf ball if I hadn’t lost the job. I’m really glad that it happened before the insurance ran out, and I think it was meant to. There really is a silver lining on every cloud.

Now it hurts to cough. I figure I probably need to exercise the diaphragm after talking to a friend of mine.

At around 2AM this morning I very literally nearly died of asphyxiation. 2, maybe 3 months ago, a child slammed a Nerf ball (golf ball sized) into my mouth and I inhaled it from sheer surprise that he did it. I thought I had swallowed it, but it turns out that it has been in my lung this entire time. Something I ate last night didn’t agree with me and I threw up. Violently. In the process, the Nerf ball decided to come out of my lung. It lodged in my throat and wouldn’t come out. I was gasping for breath, and then I couldn’t gasp anymore. Pressure started to increase. It became hard to think. I ran into the wall by accident. I started punching myself very hard in the abdomen, and finally the little styrofoam devil came out. Good thing those are non-toxic. The EMS workers looked at me and said I was very lucky — just a few more seconds and I wouldn’t have made it. I was in the emergency room for four hours. They said that there’s a chance that parts of my brain could have possibly suffered permanent damage. So far, that hasn’t manifested itself. I hope things get better soon.

The Nerf being in there for so long started doing something to my lung called “calcification”. I’m on an antibiotic called doxycycline to prevent infection. Hopefully I can avoid pneumonia.