When you can't breathe, you can't scream! - II

In around March 2008, I was shifting house from Bombay to Madras when asthma struck me severely. My breathing became increasingly difficult by the minute and all inhalers -  Salubatomol, Asthalin and combinations of these failed to have any effect. When you have asthma, you try your best to let the air out -  whether through your mouth or nose. But no matter what I tried, I just could not breathe at all. My eyes started shrinking, images started to blur and I thought it was the end of it all.. I was  hospitalised at Mehta Hospitals, Chetpet, Madras and sent to the ICU and it was a while before I recovered.  . Well I have looked death in the face - and yes, it was black!

Today, as a precaution, I keep my pumps at every possible place - office, home, car - so that I have some ammunition to fight an attack. A huge increase in weight between 2010 to 2015 led to my using the pump multiple times daily, sometimes even after every meal. For the past few months, due to a conscious reduction in weight, asthma has become very manageable. Unless something psyches me out -  -  I am able to largely live without inhalers.

Well now to the headline - what has my experience with asthma taught me? A lot, actually. I know what suffering is. It has made me someone which I would not otherwise have been. Wretched waiting periods for the next proper breath of air have taught me patience. I have an almost bottomless glass of patience.... I don't know if it is really good to have such monk-like patience or not, but I am now wired like that.

Then, the will to fight back. Once, after a point of time, I realised that I had no choice but to live like this and I thought of things I could do to get over the suffering. One set of things was to try things to ameliorate the situation - think that I am not a patient. The thought process helps you to fight back. You should not self deprecate yourself and wallow in self pity. It is easier said than done. When you are down in the dumps, you cannot but feel unhappy for yourself. It is tough, real tough, but there is no other choice. You need to believe that you will fight, you will live. You just need to gather courage. There is no one who can help you. Can anyone suffer for me? Certainly not. It is all in your head and when you slip on the positive thought process, rewire it again. Anyway, I had no chance - Had I believed I could not overcome it, I would have not.

A side effect of asthma, - if I may call it so - has been the almost zilch presence of anger. I find it very tough to get angry and have been questioned many a time by people as to how I manage it. A couple of weeks back, at office, during a potentially flammable situation, an colleague had asked me as to how I could keep so cool. I was just being myself. Well, asthma made me angry at myself for such a long time that all my anger dissipated when I found that I could not do anything about it. It is sort of intrinsic to me. To be frank, I don't like that about me.

Anger sometimes contributes to building self esteem. My ten year old boy tells me that I should get angry at people -  "come on, shout", he says! I can withstand a lot of things said about me, at times perhaps even shaming myself. Unfortunate? Perhaps. I tell myself -  "well they are only that much!"

I can just flip and forgive people. In a minute. If someone dies something wrong to me and if they just apologize, I can immediately, almost immediately, forgive people. Asthma has tested the limits of my tolerance for too long, and I have come up trumps this far. Another side effect obviously has been that I am  taken for granted and at times taken advantage of. I am trying to change this, one firm step at a time.