I Had Asthma Before It Was Popular

By Raanan Geberer
Originally appeared in "Currents" section of Hudson Reporter, Hoboken, N.J.

The rate of childhood asthma has risen steadily in the last 20 years. Some people link this to air pollution: others blame global warming.

This should give me some perverse satisfaction, although it really doesn't. I was born with hereditary asthma, and have had it most of my life.

My childhood was filled with syrupy, icky-tasting liquids that my father called "the green," "the yellow" and "the red," eventually replaced by pills. I spent many evenings during my pre-teen years hunched over the vaporizer, breathing in the steam as my mother stood over me. As for allergy injections, don't even ask! I still remember my smiling, elderly allergist pricking my arm with the needle, then joking, "Ouch! That hurts!" as I smarted in pain.

Nowadays, there are special sleep-away camps for kids with asthma. But when I was young, there either weren't any such camps or my parents didn't know about them, so I had to watch jealously as most of my classmates went away to camp. When I was 15, thinking I could do an end-run around my parents, I applied for a job as a waiter in a camp. But when I let the word "asthma" slip, the interviewer said, "We've had to send several staff members home because of asthmatic conditions." Foiled again!

As for sports, forget it! My mother insisted that every time i registered for gym class, I give the teacher a note saying that I could withdraw from physical activity when my asthma acted up. One day in junior high, I told her I was invited to play touch football. She interrogated me until she found out where the game was. She then told me that if I went there, she would stand there to make sure I didn't play.

A few years later, when I told Mom I was applying for a summer kibbutz program in Israel, she angrily made me list every single medicine I had ever taken, as if I were a former felon trying to hide a prison record. Needless to say, I wasn't accepted, although I did get to go on an archaeological dig there many years later.

My asthma began to fade away in my late teens, and I was finally able to persuade my parents to let me go to an out-of-town college -- the college had an infirmary where I could take my injections.

The illness basically disappeared by my early twenties, although I continued to take medicines as needed. I began to do activities that I wouldn't have thought of doing as a child, such as jogging, going on long bike trips, playing paddleball, canoeing and even taking martial arts classes (I now think of this period as a "golden age.")

Then, when I was around 30, I caught a bad strain of the flu. After it went, my asthma came back--in spades. I went to the emergency room many times. I often gasped for air just to walk one block to the pharmacy. At the time, I worked as a copy editor for the now-defunct Hudson Dispatch in New Jersey, and many nights when I left the newsroom, I had so little breath that the trip down the block was like climbing Mount Everest.

After a few months of this, I went to an allergist. She gave me new medicines and weekly injections. When that didn't work, she increased the injections to twice a week. Still, I kept going to the ER, and was admitted to the hospital several times. I tried acupuncture, but that didn't help either.

On top of it all, there was the girlfriend who, after I found it hard to talk one night because I was so short of breath, accused me of having "withdrawn Piscean moods" and ended our relationship.

During this period, I changed jobs twice. When I took a position in Brooklyn, I decided to find a doctor nearby. My new doctor gave me some sort of a test, then discontinued the injections while continuing the medications. I began to get better almost immediately. The visits to the ER became more infrequent, then stopped.

Eventually, I began taking newer medications and began paying attention to my diet. With one or two exceptions, I've been asthma attack-free for about 12 years.

So, to all these new childhood asthma patients that you hear about, good luck. You'll certainly enjoy better care than I did!