Jul 25 2009
What Your Breathing Says About Your Asthma Medicine
We all breathe. We have to breathe in order to live. The way you breathe can tell a lot about you? Your breathing can say that you are stressed or relaxed, in deep or mild pain, fearful or excited. The list goes on. Unless you learn to control your breathing, your breathing can tell people things that you may not want them to know; things like the fact that you may be really sick.
I learned more about this recently. I changed my asthma medicine and initially didn’t think much about the new symptoms that I was experiencing. I just assumed that I had gotten a cold from somewhere. But, as the days continued, my breathing was getting worse and I was hearing a mucus rattle in my throat and chest. This was something that I hadn’t experienced before with other colds. But, since there just coughing, I didn’t think much about it.
Then I went to karate class. Yeah, my breathing wasn’t great, but I thought I could manage class. And as always, I used my inhaler before class. Warm up was a little rough, but not that bad. We started going through some sparring exercises and my partner, as well as the instructor was getting concerned. I was starting to act like a fish out of water. Somebody was taking the oxygen out of the air or at least my oxygen, because everybody else seemed to be fine.
And then it happened. The instructor told me to sit down for a while. Initially, I didn’t know what was worse; me not being able to control my breathing (even after using my emergency inhaler, which apparently wasn’t working) or being told to sit down. Well, after a while I resumed class, being glad when it was over. After class we tried to joke about it, but there was real concern in the playfulness comaraderie.
On the way home, I started coughing and there was nothing. No air was coming in and no air was going out. This wasn’t good. I was essentially sufficating. I started pushing air through my stomach and basically practicing my kias in order to breathe, which helped.
These strange bouts of coughing continued sporadically, with the only warning was an internal fluttering in my chest. At night or at work it was at its worse. While at work I jokingly thought, “What do you do when your asthma trigger is your job?”
After finally calling the doctor (Yes, it takes a while for me to back down and ask for help), he was out and another doctor would be calling me back. For some strange reason, that made me wonder again about the side effects of the new asthma medicine that I had started taking. I had read about the side effects before, but this time I was amazed. I was a textbook example of almost each side effect; not just one or two but all of them with the exception of one or two. I finally realized what they meant by “asthma related deaths.” I checked my calendar to see when the symptoms started and it just so happened to be at the same time that I started taking the new medicine.
I stopped taking that medicine and went back to my old medicine, with a call to tell my doctor the situation. Almost overnight, the symptoms lessened and my asthma started getting under control again.
A few thoughts came out of this episode. One; stay on top of my practice in mindfulness. I think that if I hadn’t allowed myself to be so distracted, I would have realized that something was wrong earlier and correlated it to the change in medicine. Two; continue to practice diaphragmic breathing. I honestly think that it helped to literally save my life. Three, continue practicing karate. Practicing the kia, allowed me to jump start my diaphragmic breathing and relax me until my coughing spell ended. And four, contact the doctor immediately when there’s a change. Don’t try to ride it out with the hope or possibility that it will get better. It may not.
In my quest to live a holistic Christian lifestyle, I neglected different areas, which had a snowball effect on my health and my asthma control. Everything plays a part and is connected- including outside help.
