Breath

I was diagnosed with asthma after my third acute asthma attack two years ago.

Every morning, one of the first things I do is measure my breathing. I do that by blowing into a calibrated tube called a "peak flow meter." It measures the volume of my capacity to exhale. Put another way: it measures how alive you are. Asthma is a disability to exhale, not inhale as you might think.

Measuring my breath is also one of the last things I do at night, so I am always aware of my state of respiratory health. I use the flow meter to know how much medicine to inhale but I never wrote down the numbers and they rarely varied. My baseline became 500; that became obvious after a few months of writing down my numbers.

The challenge was not feeling down when the number was low. I loved the high when I blew high numbers, but I had to stop the roller coaster and that became easy once my baseline was clear so I stopped writing down my numbers and, after a while, even measuring my flow.

Then, in mid-July, I got sick and I blew 240; I could barely breath and had to go into the hospital, for antibiotics and steroids in industrial doses.

Once I was better, I saw my Pulmonologist, Dr. Dorschied whom I love. Now, my base meds are double what they have been for the past two years and if I blow 425, I have to double my meds again to eight times the original base rate, so 425 my fear factor.

The point of telling you all this? Today I blew 565, an all time high.