asthma

asthma sucks. i went out for another run today, and it sucked too. because of my asthma. it was about 11 degrees colder and about 4 hours earlier than friday's run, so i'm not sure what i was really expecting. but lemme tell ya, it was damn cold out there. cold and very windy. so much so, in fact, that my 'run' wasn't. it was a walk. and not even a fast one at that. so see - asthma sucks.

since i was diagnosed at the age of 2, i've been able to fine tune things when i'm having an asthma attack. when i was little, as is the common reaction, i'd panic. this doesn't help. actually, it's the worst reaction possible. now that i'm older, i liken it to scuba diving. when you have your very first scuba lesson, they will take you into very shallow water first. they'll tell you what to do, how to breathe, and even warn you that you might panic. you bite down on the plastic and go under. and for the first 5 minutes or so, you fight your body's natural fight-or-flight response. you have to talk yourself down and concentrate on breathing through your mouth. those first five minutes are similar to an asthma attack. you know your triggers, you find yourself in the midst of one or two or all of them, you feel your lungs shutting down, and you have to fight to remain calm. in my younger days with ignorant coaches, my mom used to scream at them to go run a mile with a paper bag over their head to see what it feels like. this is a pretty good analogy as well, especially if you have the intelligence to realize the oxygen within said bag is quite limited.

the annoying part about today was that my body itself was cold, but my lungs were completely shut down. it feels like you're in a girdle, and you can't expand your chest cavity enough to get a deep breath. one of my triggers obviously is cold weather. it takes my lungs about 20 minutes to become acclimated in such cold weather. and maybe 'acclimated' is a misnomer, seeing as how my lungs never become fully functional again while still in that environment. for example, today, even after my 20 min, i wasn't able to run. i tried. knocking my HR up in the midst of an asthma attack never goes well.

asthma is one of the 'air-trapping' 'reactive airway' diseases, under the same umbrella as emphysema and COPD. it's counterintuitive. the alveoli (the end of the road as far as the lungs are concerned, the place where gas exchange occurs) fill up with oxygen, to the point of becoming bloated and can't take on anymore. the airways inflame and constrict. what you feel is that you can't get a deep breath, you can't breathe period. this is bad, because you end up breathing faster as compensation, which causes you to even further air-trap in hyperventilation. what i tell my pediatric patients is that they should try to blow up a balloon, or try to blow out a candle a few feet in front of them. the goal being to express all that trapped air. my dad, who used to be an avid marathoner, told me when i was little that while running, and especially for me and my asthma issues, i should try to make my breaths out last more steps than the breaths in. the reason this particular trick didn't work today was because cold is one of my triggers. so regardless of how much control i had over my breathing, i was still breathing in very cold air. cold is a vaso/bronchoconstrictor. i was screwed the minute i stepped out the door. evidently my time in alaska taught me nothing about cold air.

so the lesson we learned today, boys and girls, is that charrissa's lungs have a very definite temperature restriction (pun intended), and it lies somewhere between 45 and 34 degrees. good to know.