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About 4 years ago, when I was still in college, I was working as a navigation cadet (officer in training) on a lake freighter on it's way to Port Cartier in the Gulf of St. Lawrence to load iron ore. On the way down lake Huron, I developed a nagging cough that simply wouldn't go away. It progressively got worse and by the time we were on the way back west in the St. Lawrence river, it was almost non-stop. The mate got tired of hearing me coughing in the wheelhouse, so he told me to go to bed early, which I did, but the coughing kept me up all night. My throat was so raw from coughing, I couldn't eat or drink, I was running a fever, and sometime around 4, I started to cough up blood, but was so weak, I could barely move. The Captain (who was a really good guy) opened up my door, and came in to the cabin talking before he actually saw me, "Well, you skipped watch last night, you must be pretty sick, maybe you should think about getting off in the canal and - Oh my God, you're coughing up blood!" He turned on his heel and left the cabin, but was back in about 10 minutes with my passport, discharge book, and about $200 cash. He told me that we were about 30 minutes away from the pilot exchange at Quebec City, he had radioed in to the pilot station, and that the pilots that we had on board would take me in the pilot launch to the hospital. The Pilot took me to the hospital, where they discovered I had pneumonia in my lungs. I had to be the only english speaking patient in the emergency ward. The only word I could understand was "codeine", so I just kept nodding my head, and as a result they kept me pretty doped up. But they got me hydrated fast, and took care of my throat and the infection. If you are faced with a long wait in the waiting room to see a doctor, take my advice: cough up blood on the triage nurse! Shit happens really fast, when you do that!!
do you like when it rains?
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I am a brother to dragons, and a companion to owls.
- Job 30:29
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