Eight Years

I'd say by eight-thrity a.m. snow was falling silent and steady. Like feathers from a pillow fight in the clouds. From what I could see at least.

It was New Year's weekend. About twelve inches of snow would fall on the city in around eight hours. Down the hall I could faintly hear Kyra Phillips, an anchor on CNN...

"While much of the world is getting ready to celebrate New Year's, millions of people from Philadelphia to Boston are getting ready for "bigfoot," as in a big foot of snow. Weather watchers are predicting this storm will be a classic nor'easter that will dump 14 inches of snow in some areas. It formed late yesterday off the Carolina-Virginia coast and began moving northward... This is how it looked in Philadelphia earlier today, and this is what it looks like in Manhattan right now, a near-whiteout above Herald Square. New York's La Guardia Airport is also about to shut down."

Hours later, and a world away, there'd be a series of terrorist bombings in Downtown Manila. The explosions occurred in close succession within a span of a few hours. Twenty-two fatalities were later reported with nearly a hundred more suffering non-fatal injuries.

The blasts occurred during a national holiday in the Philippines, known as Rizal Day, commemorating the martyrdom of the country's national hero; the polymathic Filipino nationalist and prominent advocate for reforms in the Philippines during the Spanish colonial era, José Rizal.

Meanwhile, I was in the same hospital where I was born now with severe pleuritic chest pain that I'd ignored for a few days. Pleurisy is the inflammation of the lining of the pleural cavity surrounding the lungs. Quite simply, I could not breathe without feeling like I was being stabbed in the ribs at the start of each inhale.

Benjamin Franklin died from the disease. Gandhi suffered from pleurisy during the first World War time, while he was in London. Pleurisy called on Francis Scott Key in 1843, Charlemagne and Tom Hardy as well.