BLAH and more BLAH

I hate being sick. My lungs have this uncanny ability to sense pollen and go into what can only be described as "Jewish mother" mode. Smothering and hinders the way. My asthma is not the kind that I wheeze and you can ear air whistling in my trachea. Nope, I get the nifty trick of sudden mucuous production and have to sound rather 'unladylike' to breathe. I have resorted to stealing my son's nebulizer at times. DH brought home some Mucinex when he got sick last month, and it's basically Robitusson minus the gacky taste. Seemed to help me get through the workday except somehow I still felt like dog doo. Then I stopped at a friend's house on the way home...her persnickety ticker is fighting to tick and it just sucks. Nothing can be done except 1)wait or 2)accelerate the process of dying. She described her symptoms and I asked if it was a heart attack. She said it probably was and that her heart was in failure, but at least she didn't have the active pneumonia anymore. I'm kind of struggling with this because it just plain defies logic. I can't claim to have that many friends. There are shifts going on in everyone's lives at this point and I feel like I'm kind of in limbo with all my friendships. There are people we hung out with weekly that have kind of moved onto other things that we don't participate in and don't care to be part of either. There are other friends that are geographically distant and have a lot going on in their lives. There's another that is never home, work sucks up a large portion of their life and I don't have much contact with them like I did before. My sister talks to me more, but we've hardly ever been close. We help each other because that's what sisters are supposed to do. It's not a relationship that parallels the friendships I forged with people outside my family tree. Then I have this one friend who is dying. And I watch and listen to it with dread of the inevitable. A person that knew me in high school with all my quirks and strangeness as a kid, tracked me down again a second time. We pretty much picked up where we left off and it's like we never lost touch, except we have individual histories unshared between us. We've never judged each other (as far as I can remember) and we each have this snarky sense of humor and respect for the other's views even if we disagree, and we have a history separated by divergent paths that crossed again. I was washing dishes earlier and got that knot in my gut thinking about how my friend is dying and I can't do anything except be her friend like I've been doing. It's exactly what she and I need though. We can't tiptoe around it, but we don't focus on it either. It does weird me out, but it's only because I haven't gotten to that point of accepting it entirely. I mean when my mom died, it was rather short notice. The doctors found everything shutting down on a Friday and her heart stopped that Monday. This is totally different. Every day she feels like crap and gets worse. Every day she fights to make it through one more day just because she's got unfinished business here still. I wish I hadthe money to take her to Disney like she wants to do before she dies. It totally sucks to be broke. It's all very humbling though, because as much as I think I have something to complain about, I really don't. And for some reason this whole thing reminds me of the movie "With Honors". I have asked my friend to avoid haunting me in the shower or while I'm getting dressed, or in otherwise compromising spots. Her response was something like: "What? No three-way-by-proxy?" Well there's that, and she should be spared the view of my husband's wherewithal.