Never trust asthma

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Never let your guard down or be fooled into thinking that you have that this disease under total control. No matter how long you’ve been symptom free or at your baseline, asthma can lurk in the shadows for months, years, even decades. Then WHAM, just when you think the tables have turned and you got this thing licked, you start exacerbating and end up in the intensive care unit again.

As Ive written about previously, if and when we fully recover from a really bad exacerbation, we asthmatics tend develop a sense of amnesia around that particular event and all the suffering we went through because of it. When you’re finally breathing better again, you don’t dwell on the times when your breathing was super bad. You just go on with your life as if nothing ever happened and you forget about it. That’s the way it should be, and that’s why asthma can be so cruel and untrustworthy. Just when you start moving ahead and start focusing on the better aspects of life, asthma slaps you right in the face and says…. “Hello person, I’m still here. You can’t rid of me that easy. All the medications, treatments and specialists in the world are not going to make me disappear completely. I’ll always be around to haunt you and figure out ways to make your life miserable, or I might even kill you”.

Having survived literally hundreds of severe asthma exacerbations, and knowing deep down that the next big one is always just around the corner, I too have been occasionally fooled into thinking that maybe this current attack will be the last. Ive just come off a 2 year long string of bad attacks that occurred pretty much back to back. It was a really tough period for me. Thankfully, that bad patch seemed to have come to a head about 3 months ago. After that that last attack, I eventually recovered and had even built my physical. endurance back up to the point of walking 3 miles a day again. Then just two days ago, as random as can be, I noticed my breathing becoming more labored than usual. I cant express to you the feeling of dread I felt at that realization. It was like someone kicked me in the gut. Back to reality, here we go again. Sure enough, a new exacerbation and the inevitable 131st hospitalization and torture fest are underway.

Moral of the story, if you have breathing problems, don’t worry about the future. Live those precious “good” days like there’s no tomorrow.

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