Hey!

Did You Know: …that your body requires oxygen to survive? It’s a fact! And apparently your bronchii clenching themselves as tightly as possible run counter to that basic requirement for persistent living. So if anyone ever tells you that you can just go right ahead and run through an asthma attack, you should endeavor to reply in the following manner:

  1. Draw them close to you in a loving manner
  2. Punch them in the chest, preferably hard enough to penetrate their rib cage. If you cannot do so on the first try, don’t worry! You’re not the Superman of chest-punching! Just be the Superman of persistence!
  3. Once you have successfully smashed into your helpful advisor’s chest, squeeze their lungs as hard as you can
  4. Scream as loud as you can into their face, “Go ahead and run through this!“
  5. Plead insanity at your criminal trial

It will be less unpleasant than actually running through an asthma attack, which I can tell you is not the right decision.

I don’t think I’ve recovered from my own asthma attack, which I just had just not too long ago. I think that they might make you a little insane, like when you are inhaling and nothing’s happening and you think you might be tasting blood but it’s just panic. I haven’t had one in a long time, but it’s amazing how quickly you remember what it feels like.

I was diagnosed with asthma when I was ten, after having a very bad case of bronchial pneumonia. Ontario was in the middle of a doctor’s strike, so my parents managed to get a house call from a very quiet, very friendly, very big man. He had a huge, dark beard, but I don’t think I had enough going on in my head to be intimidated. He was a huge, dark shape who gently asked me to co-operate as he took my pulse, listened to my breathing, looked at his watch, listened at my throat. The only thing I remember about his diagnosis was that I was breathing something like 100 times per minute, which put me more or less panting like a dog. My parents tell me that he walked them out into the hall, and explained that I really needed to be in a hospital, gave them the names of some doctors, and told them he’d call ahead.

“Let me know if you have any trouble,” he said very firmly, as he wrote down everything. “But you should not. I will call and make sure.”

After that, I don’t remember much aside from lying on a gurney in the hallway of an incredibly over-crowded Scarborough Grace hospital. My mother tells the story of attempting to register me as a patient while the admitting nurse fended off the requests of other emergencies, including a drunk guy who accidentally zipped his pants over his penis.

“Do you mind if I go ahead of you?” he pleaded with my mother, and the nurse. He gestured to the towel he was wearing around his waist, overtop of his jeans. “I… this is kind of urgent.”

The nurse exchanged a level look with my mother, who politely looked down and continued filling out forms. “You’re going to have to wait,” the nurse answered coolly, “for your turn.”

“This is an emergency though,” the guy insisted desperately, while his friend nodded earnestly. It slowly became apparent that neither of them were sober, but they had been scared awfully close to it by the sight of a cock fully snagged in a zipper. “It’s my penis. It’s caught. Down there.”

For effect, the afflicted victim pointed down at his towel, as though some visual focus on his plight might move the nurse to let him jump to the front of the line. She looked on, however, without sympathy.

“You should probably put some ice on it, then,” she said, and turned back to my mother.

I vaguely remember that a dead body was wheeled past me in the hallway while I was waiting, too. My parents both ran some solid interference on that one, but I was so tired and sick that it didn’t register. Looking back on that, I actually feel a little bit disappointed — Stephen King wrote a whole story about kids risking life and limb to see a corpse, and I had one practically served right up to me, with a white sheet and a toe tag and everything.

Stupid asthma ruined everything.

I had a different kind of Stephen King experience on the first night I stayed over, though, when I and everyone else in my shared room woke up to the sound of a kid screaming his guts out.

“NNNGGGGGGGAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” the kid screamed.

“What was that!” I hissed to Chris, the kid in the bed next to me. Chris was 11, and listened to the Beastie Boys on his Walkman; I listened to the Miami Vice soundtrack on mine. I thought he was cool.

Chris looked at me blearily, but as he started to explain, I could tell he was as unnerved as I was.

“I heard that–”

“NNNGGGGGGGAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!” came the screaming.

We were both quiet for a second. Then Chris started again, “It’s a kid who got his foot caught in one of those big augers, like people use to dig post holes, and it sliced up his leg really bad.”

Both of us just lay there in the dark, visualizing. Did the kid fall into the auger while it was running? Did lean over too far while he was looking at it? Was he fucking around near it? Did he deserve what he was getting? Did it really hurt that much? What did it look like when you slice up your leg on an earth-mover?

Again: “NNNGGGGGGGAAAAAAAAAAAAHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHHH!”

Softer, Chris added, “Right around now is when his medication wears off. He’ll get quiet again soon.”

He did, but not soon enough. I don’t remember very much about my first asthma attack until I’ve had my latest one, and then it all comes back — the atmosphere of the waiting room, muted and crowded like the lobby of a cinema; the smell of the sheets in my hospital bed, clean and stiff and itchy; the tugging of the IV in my arm, and the horrible sliding feeling as I tried to accidentally pull it out; the sound of that poor, shredded kid screaming and screaming and screaming every morning at one-thirty, until Chris got fed up enough to scream back, “Shut up! Jesus Christ, shut up!”

It’s funny how many little items come bobbing to the surface when my chest is on fire. It’s almost enough to get me using a puffer again.