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Diagnosis: Asthma

December 15th, 2006 | View Comments

Remember the bad cold? Yeah.

So some two weeks later, my body was still trying to cough up a lung, a situation that greatly displeased/concerned my officemate, every other grad student within four offices of mine, approximately 150 students in two exams I proctored that week, and everyone else who had to spend more than five minutes in my presence.

I went through two and a half bottles of cough syrup in just over a week, along with over 50 cough drops, with minimal benefit.

I finally went to the doctor on Monday. More accurately, student health finally decided I was close enough to dying to let me make an appointment on Monday. I discussed my symptoms with a nurse and two different doctors and they all immediately asked, “Do you have asthma?”

Umm…well…kind of? I don’t know? I’d actually been diagnosed with exercise-induced asthma about ten years ago, after I went to the doctor complaining that I couldn’t run with the rest of the soccer team without getting winded, and no matter how much I practiced it never got easier. He didn’t do any tests, just said I probably had exercise-induced asthma, wrote me a couple of prescriptions for inhalers, and that was it.

I used the inhalers for a while, didn’t feel any effects (probably because I wasn’t using them properly), gave up, decided I wasn’t asthmatic because I was generally asymptomatic, decided I just wasn’t cut out for distance running, and left it at that.

But at the doctor on Monday, they were like, “The cough gets worse when you breathe cold air? When you lie down? Walk? Mmmhmm. The cold triggered your asthma.” Once again, I wound up with a couple prescriptions for asthma medications.

And wouldn’t you know it, after just a couple of days, I feel immensely better. On Monday, walking the single block from my office to the student health center made me gasp for air and started a violent coughing fit. Today I walked the two blocks and three flights of stairs from the lunch trucks to my office with no incident. The cough is still there, but much less frequent.

I started reading up on asthma later and a lot of pieces sort of fell into place. Why, for example, I will happily rollerblade for 10K on a whim, but getting me to run even a mile is like pulling teeth—because I can coast on my skates for a while and give my lungs a break. Or why my throat and lungs often fill with mucus 5-10 minutes into a run and I wind up having to pull over, wheeze, cough, and spit before I can keep going, or else I feel like I’m going to die, regardless of how in-shape I am. That would be me, having an asthma attack!

Or why this is at least the third time I’ve wound up on an inhaler after a bad cold—I remember it happening even before my first asthma diagnosis. Colds are apparently a major trigger of asthma symptoms.

When I quit playing soccer in high school, within months of receiving my first asthma diagnosis, that was pretty much the end of regular exercise for me. Occasionally I get into it again, like when I trained for Run Like Hell, but I always stop again because more often than not, it makes me feel like crap. But now that I know why it happens, I can do something about it. Because I really would like to enjoy regular exercise. Being fit and healthy is a good thing.

Yvonne posted this on December 15th, 2006 @ 12:19am in Life, Sports/Fitness | Permalink to "Diagnosis: Asthma"

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