I believe that I am finally cured of pneumonia, rhino virus bacterial pneumonia that is, which I believe I got after Covid struck me for the second time in October and stayed with me through what I thought was nothing more than a persistent cough and excess phlegm problem.

It tired me out so much that I stopped walking my daily 10,000 steps and was lucky to step 3,000 times a day, according to my Fitbit, needing tissue paper and a makeshift handkerchief for the congestion that had developed. I live with my son Nicholas and his family which includes four children which I had to take extra care while in their presence. I always wore a mask and and covered my mouth when I felt a cough coming while in the kitchen or dining room.

And then it hit me. Getting out of bed around 10 pm on January 21^st I got dizzy, fell toward the floor near my bathroom, and my son me ordered an ambulance to rush me to the hospital. I had suffered no bodily injury, thank God, but the intake personnel at Bryn Mawr Hospital discovered that I had pneumonia.

Spent five days with feeding tubes of antibiotics being pumped into my body and a bunch of pesky little attachments to my chest and stomach. The food wasn’t bad but it often got stuck in my teeth and I had no toothpicks to remove the pieces. No one offered to help me with any floss and I had to use a broke-off piece of a plastic fork to get a little relieve.

And then the indigestion kicked in. I suffer from acid reflux and my daily medicine from the VA hospital was stopped by the doctors because it would interfere with their antibiotics. Ah man, how I suffered. And not just for the five days in the hospital but a whopping nine more days upon arriving home and being directed to take antibiotic pills twice a day.

(I couldn’t believe the nurses at the hospital had to get the doctors to officially prescribe Tums to help me while I was in their hospital bed. They were not authorized and only the doctors could do it! Order Tums, man Tums.)

And where does that leave us upon this viewing? Well, I ate pepperoni pizza with extra cheese in preparation for the Philadelphia Eagles Super Bowl game Sunday night and had no negative aftereffects. A sausage, egg and cheese sandwich from a nearby ALDI store was easily digested the next morning and today I can gleefully shout from my Conshohocken home “Free at Last, Free at Last, thank God Almighty I am Free at Last.”