I came down with adult-onset asthma back in 2006. A bad air quality event turned into nearly two weeks of low fever and lungs full of mucous that made me wish I could die. When I finally dragged myself from bed, I knew something was still wrong with my lungs.
A trip to the allergy and asthma clinic later, I had a diagnosis, an inhaler and not a lot of clue about how to manage my disease.
Asthma is an immune disorder
Like just about everyone else, I’ve always thought of asthma as a disease of the lungs. Turns out it’s more complicated than that - asthma is a disease of the immune system. Like an allergy, your body overreacts to a substance, triggering the asthma attack.
And, like an allergy, the more you’re exposed to your trigger, the worse your condition gets. And some conditions, like obesity, tend to make it worse.
This means that anything that stresses your immune system is going to make your asthma worse. Last year I discovered after months of feeling bad and getting attacks more often that I had a tooth that had gone rotten. After having it pulled and a week of antibiotics, I started feeling a lot better. Keep vigilant for any hidden infections, like bad teeth or abscesses.
Your inhaler is a slippery slope
It turns out that inhalers are a lot like steroids. They’re performance enhancers and athletes aren’t allowed to use them during some competitions. And, like steroids, they lose efficiency with use.
One summer of bad air quality I found myself using my inhaler a lot, multiple times a week. By the end of the week, it wasn’t working as well. I asked the clinic about it and they said, yeah, that will happen. When it stops working, we’ll give you a different prescription.
Of course that inhaler is less well covered by insurance. So I saw myself on this chemical treadmill, getting asthma attacks from bad air quality, using the inhaler until I ran out its usefulness, then going back to the doctor for another, more expensive one. And that was all the answer they had for me.
Asthma attacks will kill you
About 250,000 Americans die premature deaths every year from asthma attacks. One day, you don’t get your inhaler in time, you can’t breathe it in or that inhaler has stopped working from you. Then your lungs close up and you die.
I tried avoiding my triggers - mostly cigarette smoke - by keeping an eye out for smokers and crossing the street or holding my breath to avoid the smoke. But there were so many situations I couldn’t avoid: Someone smoking in a car, a discarded cigarette smoldering on the ground sending out fresh bursts of smoke with every gust of the wind, a sudden shift in the wind that brought smoke from across the street to my face - I just couldn’t avoid them all.
Asthma disproportionately hurts the poor
If you look at a population map of asthma, you mostly see it clustered around freeways and ports. That’s because bad air quality in those areas causes asthma. And that’s where housing is cheap, thus where poor people tend to live. When anyone opposes improving emissions controls on vehicles, they’re really saying, “Whatever, it’s mostly the poor who will eat the consequences.” And, of course, poor people have worse access to medicine and less ability to pay for the increasingly expensive inhalers. And thus, more poor people are incapacitated and killed by asthma.
Smokers don’t care
Cigarette smoke is my kryptonite. It was a big part of my initial trigger event and continues to be the thing that nearly always gives me an attack. I’ve never smoked, though a lot of people who find out I have asthma assume I do.
The first time that I was sitting in an outdoor dining area and someone lit up and refused to put it out even when it was giving me an asthma attack, despite smoking in those areas being illegal where I live, I was bewildered and outraged. How can they not care that their purely voluntary recreational drug use was putting someone in distress?
But as I had the same experience over and over again, regardless of how I approached the situation, I began to realize that smokers (at least the ones who smoke in public) are in deep denial about how unhealthy their addiction is. They won’t admit how bad it is for them, and they sure aren’t going to admit it’s bad for those around them. Pointing out to a smoking parent that they’re putting their kid at elevated risk for asthma is a good way to get death threats.
I’ve learned the hard way that smokers don’t care about your health any more than they do their own. Don’t expect them to know the law or follow it. I mean, who expects good social conduct from a drug addict?
Prevention is better than the inhaler
Realizing that every time I had an asthma attack, my asthma was getting worse, I was pretty desperate to figure out some way to keep myself off this slippery slope to the grave. Fortunately, my husband had a carbon filter mask in his workshop for when he was working with chemicals or something smoky that he wanted to avoid breathing. I started carrying one and putting it on when I smelled or saw something (usually a cigarette smoker) that could trigger my asthma.
I got a lot of weird looks. Some of people had weird assumptions about why I was masking up. But it worked - I could make it to and from work without breathing anything to give me an asthma attack. The masks and filters were expensive and required frequent maintenance and still didn’t save me from someone who did the ninja act with their cigarette, like the woman who lit up right in front of me, turned and blew it all into my face (she apologized after, but it was clear she had no idea that anyone might possibly object to a faceful of smoke). But it meant I hardly ever had to hit my inhaler, and my asthma mostly stopped getting worse.
Be ruthlessly honest with yourself about your triggers
Asthma, like any disease, will stress you out. You want comforts, familiar things that make you feel good. Unfortunately, a lot of those things make asthma worse. If you smoke cigarettes or cannabis, if you use scented products, if you live with a dog or cat, it can make your asthma worse. But giving them up when you’re already stressed can seem impossible. It’s a conundrum that kills.
At the clinic, they asked me about lifestyle choices, but when I said I don’t smoke and exercise regularly, they seemed to think that was as much as was possible to do.
I had to get really serious about what I exposed myself to. What made me wheezy even if I didn’t get a full-out attack. I gradually cut out most dairy from my diet (particularly ice cream) because I kept noticing I got worse after eating it.
Some people have cured their asthma
At the clinic they told me about treating my asthma with the inhaler, but they never discussed prevention, much less a cure.
I had a friend who had asthma as a kid and young adult who cured himself through traditional Chinese and ayurvedic teas and a ton of serious body work. But he was living in a massage school in the redwoods, able to devote nearly full time to his health. As I was working full-time in the city, I didn’t think it was possible for me - even if I could handle those nasty, stinky teas.
It wasn’t until I started going to a traditional Chinese acupuncturist that I started to think a cure was possible for me. On one of my first visits, she gave me directions for how to cure my asthma, but I thought the plan was unrealistic: completely cutting out refined sugar, white flour and white rice from my diet, losing weight, eating pickled garlic three times a day, massaging my lung and kidney meridians every day. Nobody has time for that, I thought.
But as the years went by, I saw that even as I was holding the same level of physical fitness, my health was getting worse. I kept getting sick more - lingering colds and flus that would last for weeks. I started to stress more with every flu season that came around, worried that despite vaccination, I was still getting sick too much.
Finally one summer I’d been sick a lot and the forecast for the upcoming flu season was dire. I thought, “If I don’t get on top of this now, I could die this winter from the gorram flu.” So I went back to my acupuncturist and had her lay it all on me. When I looked at the whole foods diet and daily exercise as an alternative to an early death, it didn’t seem that unreasonable.
It’s been about 10 months. I’ve lot 15% of my body weight and my trainer is impressed with my cardiovascular progress. My acupuncturist tells me I’m doing my homework well. I haven’t cured my asthma, but I’ve taken an unexpected dose or two of cigarette smoke without an attack. I know I’m on the right track, but there’s still a lot of work between me and health. But I wish I’d known what was possible before I wasted more than a decade standing still.
If you have asthma and think it might be possible for you to invest the time and effort to try to improve or cure it, I suggest you find a good traditional Chinese medical practitioner and do exactly what they tell you to. It’s better than the alternative.
