A Visitor From The Past

I spent the last week flat on my back, sick, because something I assumed I had left behind decades ago came knocking again: asthma. There is a particular fear in not being able to pull in enough air. What scared me more, though, were the sounds. Lying in bed, I kept hearing strange noises that nobody else in the room could pick up, and they would jolt me awake in the small hours. I work as a psychologist, so I understand what hearing voices usually means, and part of me wondered.

By the time I finally went for help I was already very sick, which made the whole thing confusing. No fever. My oxygen readings looked fine. My heart rate sat where it should. I had simply run out of gas. When the Emergency Room staff put me on oxygen, loaded me with steroids, and admitted me, the relief was enormous, even if I suspect a few of them quietly wondered whether I belonged there. That weekend I missed church and skipped the Mother's Day celebration. Grandmother's Day, really, in my case.

Now I rattle around the house on a long list of asthma medications and I am slowly improving. A single trip to the doctor leaves me drained, and I cannot talk for long before the breath runs out. What keeps surfacing is a sense of having been here before. As a kid I remember the same thing exactly: clawing for air, coughing until it felt like my insides were coming loose. I must have terrified my parents. Winter after winter, it happened.

Everyone told me I would grow out of it, and I believed I had. Still, every so often that old gasping would catch me somewhere, and I would quietly slip out of wherever I was to settle my breathing. I always apologized on the way. I did not want anyone fussing over me, so I would remove myself, calm down, and wait for the spell to pass before coming back.

Lately there is a new wrinkle that unsettles me more than the rest. I have started reacting hard to things floating in the air. Twice now I caught what was happening in time and removed myself from the room, sometimes under my own steam, sometimes leaning on friends. Carrying a rescue inhaler turned out to be one of my better decisions.

Asthma also leaves marks that linger and resurface years down the line. Wood smoke gives me trouble, fireplaces included, and before second-hand smoke became a public concern, reacting to cigarette or wood smoke mostly got me labeled a party pooper. I could sense strong chemicals in a room too, just from how my body responded to them.

For years I had bronchitis and never connected it to asthma. I kept showing up to work, hoping I could stifle a cough long enough to talk with a patient. I figured it was not contagious and would clear up eventually, even if eventually took forever. Cold air was the worst. I had to wrap a scarf over my mouth or risk a coughing fit, and breathing through my mouth only made things harder.

What I did not grasp was that my bronchioles were swollen and irritated, trapping air so I could not exhale enough to draw a fresh breath in. Those were the culprits behind the wheezing only I could hear. Chest x-rays came back clean, so they offered no clue and no route to treatment.

If you feel sick, you are sick. Keep pushing until you land on something that actually works. Do not apologize for something outside your control. Yes, it will inconvenience people, and yes, you might be the center of attention for a while. That is allowed. It is your turn to ask for help and to accept it. Do not die quietly trying to spare everyone else the bother.

A postscript, because the story moved again. I now have a preliminary diagnosis of pulmonary hypertension, which only emerged after an echocardiogram of my heart. Before that, I had sailed through every breathing test twice over. My oxygen numbers stayed up in the 90s. My lung x-rays, two recent ones, were clear. That is why they sent me home without oxygen, even though it had helped so much in the hospital.

My nurse practitioner had a different hunch. She suspected my heart was straining to keep those oxygen numbers high, and that is what seems to be going on, invisible until the echocardiogram caught it. Oddly, earlier echocardiograms had shown nothing. Now I am waiting for my cardiologist to go over the results and confirm it, which could mean more testing.

My takeaway is plain. Sometimes when you think you are sick, you really are sick, so do not stop looking for answers. My own case is proof enough.

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