Breathless

Usually you don’t think about it at all. As a baby, it’s one of the few things you know how to do without being taught. Before walking, before speaking, there is breathing. When you meditate, though, you notice the ebb and flow. Inhale/exhale. The necessity of life.

When my dog rides in cars or after a long walk, sometimes she pants. A canine does not sweat. Instead, this hard, labored breathing, which my husband thinks is so annoying, is her way of cooling herself off beneath the layers of black-and-white thick fur.

My next door neighbor growing up was a lifetime smoker and, in the end, he couldn’t walk from his house to the car without wheezing, the breath he used to take for granted not coming.

Sometimes my own breath also has a hard time coming too. The heh/heh/heh so loud that others can hear it. I remember one Halloween I paraded the streets with a clown costume and a bag of candy and then, instead of gobbling it down, five or six years old, I sat gasping at the hospital. “Your daughter has asthma,” the young confident doctor said. For some reason, we didn’t want to believe him.

Later, I would be undiagnosed, rediagnosed. Once, when climbing a stairway in junior high school, I noticed that I was the only one having trouble, the only one who couldn’t walk it without panting like Maggie my dog.

I look around me at a table of people sitting, writing, and I wonder if they too are aware of the air they breathe. I think about the night I spent in the ER in Kentucky. I’m pretty sure they forgot about me after they hooked me up to a breathing machine, and then left me. The lady behind the next curtain was more vocal, so she got more attention. “We had a crazy night,” they explained when I finally pressed the button for a nurse and asked if I could leave. They wrote me a prescription for more steroids. Still, now, I can feel my chest tighten and my heart beating too hard.

I remember the night in my college apartment that I found a cockroach and called the emergency maintenance line and said, “Look, you need to take care of this. I have asthma.” I remember reading about the model who died of this very thing. I remember sitting with my husband in our house in Ohio, inducing asthma by accident when I had to chase his parents’ dog through the chill of winter because I convinced myself that I was like the dog whisperer, that I could take their dog out without a leash and that he would listen. Buddy, their Jack Russell Terrier, thought otherwise, and I trailed him through ice and snow up to my knees. Me calling, him ignoring. Finally, I found a dead end, cornered him and carried him in, covered in sweat. Later, in bed, I willed myself—hard—to breathe normally, felt a little dizzy, delirious, as I wondered if I had overdosed on my inhaler. I asked my husband if he’d miss me if I died. Half-asleep, he mumbled something incoherent.

I did not go to the hospital that night, though Jamie offered to take me, because I remembered the last time I had gone. How long I’d waited and how much it had cost. I think now, as my breathing stabilizes and I feel relieved, of all the people everywhere who must also weigh these things and also try to chose between life and breath and money.