The Joys Of An Asthmatics Life

Ventolin, salbutamol, puffer, inhaler, reliever. Recognise these words!? Im sure you have!! These are just what asthmatics use because they get out of breath right!? Overweight and dont exercise so use their "puffer" and carry on as if life never stopped. WAIT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Blinking heck well I have a shock for you. If you think that this is asthma defined you need to spend a day in my shoes, actually scrap that, ill give you the morning or the afternoon, you pick as you wouldnt cope a day. Asthma is not a few puffs of the blue and carry on where you left off. My life has been destroyed by asthma. My asthma is very different and suprisingly not many people have it which is why its not as well known. I have severe brittle asthma. I could be sat watching telly and then within a split second my lungs could decide that actually they didnt like that cold air that ive now started breathing in because of the winter months. Within that split second my oxygen levels will plummet, my co2 levels will rise to dangerous levels, I will become exhausted, tired, confused, SCARED. My life is hanging in the balance once again. I need drugs wuick. Quicker than quick infact. I need an ambulance, shit wheres the phone, shit I cant talk. Phew my girlfriend has walked into the room, 999 "ambulance"...amazing paramedics come within minutes because ive an emergency flag on my address alerting them of my asthma. They put a needle in my veins, they push drugs into my blood stream, they put and oxygen mask on my face with more nebulisers. The get me into the back of the ambulance, hook me up to all the monitors, the pre call the emergency room, blue lights go on, sirens blaring, 90mph down the dual carriageway, arrive in resus, consultant;nurses;junior doctors;itu team all waiting form my arrive, fuck where they taking my girlfriend please dont leave me on my own, doctors listen to my chest, its silent and no air is shifting, the stab a needle into the artery in my wrist to draw special blood, they test the blood and get instant result, results arnt good, more iv drugs being pumped into my system, muscles working harder than they should, doctors start getting really concerened, I move from resus to intensive care, they stab my artery again with a more perminant lline, they attatch a tighter fitting mask to my face, I remain like this for hours, finally drugs start kicking in, it becomes easier to breathe, my life is coming back to me. Ive survived another. Attack!! I guess me going through a breif outline of my life is like trying explain to a man the real pain women go through with Labour and sadly they will never know for real. For you, there is a very similar way to know how I feel, tape up ur nose so u cant breathe through it, put a normal average size drinking straw between your lips, now tape up the rest of your mouth so no air can get in other than through that straw. Struggling yet!? No, ok, now go and run for 20 minutes flat. You wish. You wouldnt make it 2 minutes!! Thats how I feel daily and when an attack shows its ugly face this struggling and fighting for breath feel intensifies. Ontop of this, I take many medications. These have side effects. I need to devide, do I want these side effects ir do I want to breathe!? Im not an idiot, I choose to breathe. Unfortunatly though this brings me to todays appoinyment with the doctor. One of the side effects from my medications is a muscle wasting disease. Ive now been told that theyve looked into my case. Theyve assessed everything. Theyve looked at alternative drugs. THERES NOTHING THEY CAN DO. My muscle disease I am told today will get worse. The only way it can remotely get better is by coming off the medications, but like I say, I dont and I cant breathe without these drugs. Currently its getting to the stage im struggling even more to hold my head up. Ive been given exercises to try and strengthen my neck muscles but im told not to do them too iften as I can rip them and then they are permanently damaged beyond repair. Inevitably I will end up like a newborn, I will not be able to hold my head up. So, back to my earlier question, do you want to spend a day in my shoes!? TTFN XXXX

Death

Ironically the though of death scares me, yet given the chance i would end my life tonight.

Yes ok some people have it worse off than me, but this is my life. This isnt how i use to live and this isnt how i want to live.

Yes people who have been told they only have a few weeks to live literally want to do everything they can and see everyone to say goodbye
I guess the lucky (if u can call it lucky) thing here is that theyve been given that warning. That chance to say goodbye.
With my illness, i could literally die at any point. Without any warning and without any friends or family

I sucks.

It feels like im in prison and on deaths row. Just casually sat here waiting for it to be my time.

Why is more not being done about asthma.

Why is there no media on it. No regular press releases. No regular adverts raising awareness. We deserve that is nothing else right!?

Im not going to go into details to justify why i would end my life in a second because there are to many reasons. All you need to know is that, asthma sucks. The side effects from all these life saving lung medications suck.

Dont take your life for granted. You never know when it may abruptly come to an end.

TTFN

XXXX

Death

Ironically the though of death scares me, yet given the chance i would end my life tonight.

Yes ok some people have it worse off than me, but this is my life. This isnt how i use to live and this isnt how i want to live.

Yes people who have been told they only have a few weeks to live literally want to do everything they can and see everyone to say goodbye
I guess the lucky (if u can call it lucky) thing here is that theyve been given that warning. That chance to say goodbye.
With my illness, i could literally die at any point. Without any warning and without any friends or family

I sucks.

It feels like im in prison and on deaths row. Just casually sat here waiting for it to be my time.

Why is more not being done about asthma.

Why is there no media on it. No regular press releases. No regular adverts raising awareness. We deserve that is nothing else right!?

Im not going to go into details to justify why i would end my life in a second because there are to many reasons. All you need to know is that, asthma sucks. The side effects from all these life saving lung medications suck.

Dont take your life for granted. You never know when it may abruptly come to an end.

TTFN

XXXX

Stress!!

As I mentioned yesterday, I wasnt going to be doing a lot today because of having to asthma attacks yesterday, so I sat and editted the photographs I took yesterday. Ok, well, firstly we took Dixie for a walk around the feild, had some dinner and then I went up to our room and started the photo editting process. For the first two hours sorting the photos everything went swimmingly. I took 149 photos all in all, that turned out good. There was more but of course some were blurred and some people were blinking etc so the had to go leaving 149. Out of all of them I have for 70 I really like and im focusing my time on. The first lot of editing was good, cropping, sharpening, de noising and colour altering. But heres where the stressful thing started. I spent the next three hours wanting to give up. I had been given some templets to be able to group together 4 or more photos together on one page, annoyingly though my photo editting softwares didnt want me to be able to do this and no matter what I done to get it to work, the things just didnt want to work. So I have gone for plan be for adding borders and didderent effects to the appropriate shots. I still have a hell of a lot of work to do and im going to be focusing my time on it tomoorow whilst my other half is volunteering. Another adding if stress, is that I have weighed myself a day early. Well, technically I weigh myself everyday. I have sadly become very obsessive about my weight since ive been trying to loose it. Anyway, this week because ive been bad with food, I have currently put on 3pound. So like on Friday when I punished myself with swimming, today I punished my self by walking around the feild twice with Dixie. Ok, so to the average person walking around a feild twice may seem a little lame, but when you have muscles and lungs like ive got, it could be seen as a disaster waiting to happen, I dont care though, I need to loose this weight. Im just not happy with it anymore and it was driving me down along with everything else. Heres to next week though for a better amount of good thoughts and goals. Especially as its mine and my other halfs first time camping together. Yay. TTFN XXXX

Dentist Disapointment

I final managed to get to a NHS dentist after 4 months of being on the waiting list. Horray...or not so it seems. When they rang me to tell of the surgery that will have me, I rexplained that I am disabled and not very good on stairs, they said this was ok and sent me the details to make an appointment. The only perfect thing about this surgery is that it is very local. The rest goes down hill. To get into my surgery you have to go up two flights of stairs (er what happened to disabled friendly). My actual dentist funnily enough has ubber bad breath which is really off putting when your led there breathing through your nose sucking in his aroma and the last bad thing is. The dentist doesnt seem to have heard about asthma, strange one I thought. As suspected though, it was about time for my steroids and nebisers to start effecting my teeth, and in two weeks I now need to have treatment. Im really not looking forward to it as the last NHS dentist I saw in Bristol butchered my mouth and has put me iff ever since. On good notes though, my oral hygiene is good!! Ill let you know how it goes in two weeks!! TTFN XXXX