This started yesterday afternoon, a pretty typical San Francisco day--bit windy, bit chilly on the hill when I left for radiation. I took the elevator down to the lobby and saw the postman--no need to check, and left for the two block walk to the bus station, bus one of two that I take to get to Mt. Zion Hospital and the Helen Diller Family Cancer Center. I haven't bothered to find out if Helen was related to Phyllis, but I think of that every time I see the sign.
About half way to the bus stop I suddenly had...an asthma attack? It seems that way, but though I'm officially an asthmatic, I equivocate because i haven't had a full on attack for....40 years? maybe a bit more. I've used inhalers, and I've taken special antibiotics for the lungs, occasionally, but more as a precaution, not because i was struggling to breathe. Yet here I was on a sidewalk overlooking Market Street, certain that I couldn't breathe whatsoever.
I struggled to the bus stop hoping that this was temporary, but it kept going, moderating a bit such that I could get on, and set down and will myself at least slightly calmer. But all I could think of and all I could feel was the fear and anxiety that 6 and 7 year old Mark felt when, like clockwork, I'd spend a cold weekend hunched over a steamer, with Vicks Vap-o-rub smeared all over me, struggling for breath. So frightened that I couldn't begin to speak, so short of breath that I couldn't anyway.
By the time I got to UCSF, it seemed better, but then I left the bus and pow, again, I couldn't breathe. I reeled into the cancer center, got downstairs to the radiation oncology rooms and called for the nurse.
Ah, poor Janet--she looked as concerned as I was panicked, and when she hooked me up to the monitor my pulse was racing and jumping and the room sounded like a rave. Then we got Dr. Yom in on the act.
Why did this happen? For me, there used to be triggers that were predictable, and probably still are....though I don't rake and jump in piles of leaves anymore, I remember some dicey moments in Indiana just raking and moving them around. There were gardeners working the stretch of the sidewalk where I was walking, and they may have left, in the air, the infamous hanging chad of vegetation which was cut bad, the added insult of blowers which toss everything into the air just for people like me.
Or it was the temperature and the wind and the humidity, all hitting the sweet spot that I cannot handle--certainly possible.
Or it's my weakened system fighting all the old boogeymen who come back to haunt when we think we're bravest--that kneecap a man into a child and make him want to cry.
I'm sitting in a chair upright as possible at 5am, having not slept, with a heating pad on my chest. I don't know if the heat really helps, but I tell myself it does, and that calms me down. I'm still a bit tight, but nothing like the afternoon....at least until I take the heating pad off and move around.
When I was a kid, asthma ate whole weekends, whole evenings and nights, days of school. In the Fifth Grade, my mother took me to a new pediatrician, Dr. Nicodemus, who treated me like I was curiously grown up--he would joke with me, and patted my head--and I thought he was the most incredible doctor I'd ever met.
He talked my mother into signing me up for band, particularly for a brass instrument. His theory was that the breath control needed to play something like an alto horn, which is what I chose to learn, was correlative to the breath control I needed to learn to short circuit asthma attacks, to calm myself, and bring them quickly under control.
He brought out a pill that he wanted me to try--he called it a salt and pepper pill, which it resembled--yellowish, with black and white specs in it. He gave me, not my Mother, the pill vial and told me to take one whenever I felt my chest was tightening, and it would help me avoid an asthma attack.
Finally, he told me to leave school whenever I needed to and come to his office when I felt the attack was on its way. No permissions needed.
The alto horn worked, the pill was a placebo, and just the thought that I could leave school if I needed was enough to turn the tide. Dr. Nicodemus psyched me out so successfully that from his tenure in my life, to today, I've smoked, and jogged and worked out and always listed myself as an asthmatic with "no problems" on medical forms. Maybe not in the future....
Weakness begets weakness, and right now, I'm weak. I'm incredibly frustrated with the mounting pile of side effects. The unpredictability is wearing at me. The discomfort of not speaking much and not eating is occasionally insufferable. My practical life is subsumed in rituals I have to follow just to function. f am feeling too a rising of anger at this shortness of breath....seeing that it may end with a stupid oxygen tank, even if temporary, another marker of insufficiency.
Dr. Nicodemus, where the hell are you? At 52, I may need a refresher course.
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