Growing up,
I was kind of a high maintenance kid. Moody and full of stomach aches, I worried endlessly and had a bucket load of
allergies. Looking at my endearing qualities on paper, I wonder how my parents put up with me as well as they did. I was a good student, so that probably
helped. And I was awfully cute.
Not really.
Anyway, one
of my childhood aggravations was asthma. Not
the gasping for air, call the medic kind, just the “my lungs hurt again, I
can’t get a deep breath” sort. My
pediatrician, cutting edge that he was, called it borderline asthma, told my mom
to expect symptoms on smoggy days, and sent us on our way. Since this was all I knew, I didn’t give a second thought to my
herculean attempts at deep breath.
Fast forward
thirty years and a couple of asthmatic kids later. My oldest has exercise-induced asthma, and my
middle boy has the more traditional daily-inhaler variety. Between the two of them, we’ve had
hospitalizations, pneumonia, bronchitis, bronchiolitis, croup, asthma attacks,
and chest colds galore. I’ve devoted
much time and effort into understanding the warning signs, symptoms, and
protocols for anything having to do with lung functioning. I own a stethoscope, a peak flow monitor, and
two nebulizer machines; and my neighbor has an oximeter, should I ever need to
measure oxygen levels. I’m extreme, I
know. But in my defense, 3 hospital
stays under the age of 2 is enough to make any nervous mom hypervigilant.
I’ve gone
soft, however. As my boys’ asthma has
become more predictable, I’ve realized that I’m no longer on top of my a-game
(a=asthma). So when I started feeling
those old familiar lung pains in the morning and caught myself bracing the
chair to try and get a satisfying deep breath, I began to worry about what was
surely an impending asthma attack. And after
a year of doing intense cardio weekly, I had my first experience with extreme
shortness of breath. It was alarming,
and put together with the other symptoms, I promptly diagnosed it to be the re-emergence
of my childhood asthma.
I knew I was
going to need an official diagnosis if I was going to get myself fixed, so I
waited until I was good and sick before I made my way to the asthma doc. Looking forward to the end of my lung annoyances, I went into that PFT test intending to do my feeble best. I blew with all my might, spurred on by the
assistant’s, “Keep blowing! Keeping
blowing! Keep blowing!” And wouldn’t you
know it? My lung volume came back at
125%. Not sure how a value over 100% is
possible, but directionally speaking, I was in marathon shape. The look on my doctor’s face said, “you, my
dear, are a big hypochondriac” even though her words said, “I don’t see
anything to worry about.”
Perhaps out
of pity, she sent me home with an inhaler.
Over the next day, my cold progressed to a cough, and my lungs seemed very
unhappy. The cough sounded odd, so I
went online to see what I could find out.
And that’s how I came across this site (http://children.webmd.com/pertussis-whooping-cough-10/coughing-sounds).
Can I tell you how much I love the internet? Specifically for this reason. How awesome is it to be able to turn on your
computer and use a sound byte to diagnose yourself?
And there it
was…my cough. The one with the wheezing. That cinched it for me. I got out that inhaler and gave it a
try. After choking on the first attempt,
I tried again. It took about 10 minutes
to feel my lungs calm down, and I got a headache from it, but after days of not
being able to get a satisfying deep breath, I was breathing like the best of them. Hypochondriac or not, I felt better. Even the tickle that seemed to spontaneously
force the coughs out of me dropped from every few seconds to every few
minutes. Sweet relief.
For all I
know, she gave me a placebo, and I inhaled a big old puff of saline mist. I don’t care.
It’s magic saline mist.
After
hearing my cough in that sound byte and seeing improvement with the inhaler, I shifted my search to “cough with wheezing.” Hoping to find more information
on my noisy cough, I found this clip on youtube. Alarming and hilarious at the same time, I
post it, for your enjoyment. Presumably,
she is doing fine.
3 comments:
My doctor told me I have post nasal drip, when I walked in with all those symptoms. PND my arse! And I'm NOT a hypochondriac.
1. Those old pictures are funny. Man, mom's old sofa looks like a frat house reject.
2. Your cryface looks like L.
3. That video really picks up at :39 seconds.
4. Since when do you do "intense cardio"......?
@BTAM Next time you're in town, let's go have smoothies until the asthma kicks in and I'll let you try out my inhaler. :)
@Gun thanks for ratting me out. Doesn't zumba count as intense?
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