DEARMAIZIE

When I was diagnosed with lung cancer, one of the first things I did was Google “what it’s like to die from lung cancer.”

In April 2015, the odds of beating my disease were pretty dismal. Convinced I wouldn’t make it past Christmas, I started reading to prepare for what I was sure was to come. The answers I got were stark. Active dying,” they call it, generally consists of: fluid build-up around the lungs, coughing, shortness of breath, airway obstruction, cachexia (muscle and body wasting), pain, fatigue, and various other unpleasant things. Not to mention the emotional aspect, or the hallucinations, agitation, etc.

Rush Limbaugh died yesterday. Of lung cancer. In the midst of pandemic and climate devastation to millions of lives, this was a brief, shining moment of national glee. Hurrah.

Rush Limbaugh was a pus-filled blight on humanity. Much as I try, I don’t understand for a second how one mind can become so monstrous, so hateful, so cruel, so sadistic and so worthless. He should never have been born. He didn’t have any children, so there’s his meager contribution to civilization. Though it can never atone for the damage he wrought.

I hope he choked on his own phlegm, that his pain was agonizing and beyond the reach of the most powerful opioids (irony alert), and that he consciously writhed in torment every single, putrid second of the last days of his miserable life. I only feel sorry for the people who had to clean up after his body.

Cancer is said to be the Emperor of All Maladies. If it holds the power to kill that miserable little son-of-a-bitch with keen and abundant agony, I bow to you, Cancer. Well done.