Asthma

I am asthmatic.  And that’s absolutely fine.  I’ve had asthma as long as I can remember, and only one has it landed me in hospital, when I was young, and only a couple of times have I been forced to go onto a nebulizer to breathe clearly.  It’s just a part of my life.

But sometimes I wonder – that same ‘what if’ that I’m sure hangs over every only child (another box I tick) or schoolgirl with spectacles.  What would it be like without asthma?  Or with siblings, for that matter?  I have no way of knowing, having never experienced this for myself.  Perhaps nothing would change at all, save a tweak in my routine of daily inhaler and prescription costs saved once every three months.  Perhaps more than I imagine.  Perhaps when I run, my breath will flow easy and clear, for certainly, particularly in winter, it’s not my legs that let me down half so much as it its my lungs.  Perhaps in spring, I won’t become hayfever ground zero, and if I do, perhaps that hayfever won’t trigger throat and nose trouble.  Maybe I’d sleep better, sing better – and then again maybe a runaway brain and the inability to hold a tune have very little correlation with lung capacity.  I take it for granted that I carry an inhaler everywhere – it’s not a worry, it just is.  Just like asthma itself.

And in that I have nothing else to measure my experience against, the question of ‘what if’ remains entirely hypothetical.  Yet every now and then; endlessly engaging.