On Asthma

I suppose I feel safe now, sitting cross-legged on a scratchy, brown, hotel blanket. I feel safe and for the most part, I am safe, and so I block my fear from my mind and laugh about it. Sometimes I forget about you completely—or I think I do, but can't in reality, as you gnaw tenaciously at the back of my mind. Somehow, with nothing to recommend you, you hath me in thrall; I feel trapped by recognition, so I push myself into a non-reality, a dream in which you do not exist. You know, dear Executioner, it's often much nicer without you.

Those days always start off normally. Sometimes it's terribly cold out, and that makes sense, but that day was warm and moist and lovely, and even later I couldn't understand what drew you out. Were you disturbed from your slumber by a change in weather? Was it just spite? I suppose I can't know; but that I didn't expect you made it somehow worse. So I ran. I ran, and when you stirred and quietly stroked at my airways, I ignored you. Maybe I felt you laugh; I don't know. You clenched at my heart, at my lungs, you pulled at my airways in some sort of infantile joy. I choked, as much with tears as directly from your efforts. I told myself to stay calm, to stay quiet, to breathe, but as my fear heightened, so did you, clinging to it like a lifeline. At times like this, warm and calm, I can't help but feel ridiculous in the vulnerability that you pull out of me, but Seneca said it better than I ever could: “...while with this you're constantly at your last gasp? This is why doctors have nicknamed it 'rehearsing death,' since sooner or later the breath does just what it has been trying to do all those times.” Is that what you're trying to do, teach me how to die? But all you've taught me is how to dread it.

The lights were over-bright and cold, glinting off of stainless steel, rendering the white sheets of the examination table sharp as ice and snow. The computer beside me hummed meaninglessly. It was old, likely older than the painfully typical prescription that they've repeatedly hurried me out with, month after month, year after year. Every visit feels like nothing more than a rerun of the last; it's only the wait times that vary, by seconds or minutes or, every now and unfortunate then, half-hours, and there I was again, bathed in fluorescent light, awkwardly twiddling my still-blue thumbs on this oddly patterned, apparently plastic couch. I suppressed a series of coughs, relics from that morning's episode. After a few moments or months, the doctor bustled in. This time she'd brought a medical student. She handed me the peak flow metre, which is like mine except that the mouthpiece is cardboard. Three times, I blew into it, producing exemplary numbers like 250, 310, 275. I ought to be hitting 450, but, of course, you wouldn't like that, would you, old friend? But I could feel you frown as she says something about the salmeterol xinafoate and fluticasone propionate dry powder inhaler I've been using, and for the first time in five years, she'd suggested something else. Plain fluticasone proprionate and a higher dosage. I was very nearly pleased, and you curled irritably around my chest and shuddered.

I refer to you by name, I talk to you as if you're somebody else. In some ways, I suppose we're like that, two separate wills fighting to control something beyond either of us; to breathe or not to breathe, to live or die. But in a far more real way, you're nothing more than a part of whatever it is that I am, as pained as I am to admit that you are mine, that this clinging, festering weakness is mine. You've taught me a fair amount, I concede. You've taught me how to fear, dread, and hate; presumably I'd have far less occasion to nowadays without your constant guidance. You've taught me to suffocate; perhaps you've showed me how it is to die halfway. Of course, I've never died, so I can't know how far the path goes (although please, don't take this as an invitation to show me). But look, I've grown flippant in your momentary absence! Perhaps this is all to say that as ardently as I despise you beyond anything, I'm very close to actually appreciating you—such is the nature of hatred, I suppose. But, please, rest assured that I will take these words back more quickly than they were written the moment you again rear your ugly head.