ASTHMA CASE HISTORIES: ‘CHILDHOOD ASTHMA’, NEVER OUTGROWNKate is a journalist who, until recently, carried her asthma medication everywhere. Now her only regret about asthma is that she misses chocolate.In 1971 I got a pink fairy suit with a wand and an asthma attack fot Christmas. I was five, and I couldn’t work out how to stop the feeling that I was drowning on dry land, and the red panic that followed it. I must have looked bizarre — a gasping, pale, little figure with gossamer wings. Afterwards, of course, all the countless specialists, chiropractors and physiotherapists my mother took me to told me, never fight the asthma, just flow with it. Easy to say in educated tones, but impossible to do. You can’t tell a child who is sure she is about to die not to fight for her life. And 20 years and thousands of empty puffers later, the instinct is the same. Practice doesn’t prepare you at any time for a bad attack.I have always been one of those sufferers whose condition is a giant roller coaster, swooping in and out of health at amazing speed, taking 20 puffs of Berotec one day and two the next. I guess this is mostly because I kept waiting for asthma to just go away one day. I looked upon definite controls as giving in to the fact it was with me to stay. But early in 1991, the Volumatic, a plastic device which looks more like a drink container than something I will love forever, led to my lung capacity being normal. Normal, a word I had mentally stored away as something which would never apply to me.It wasn’t for lack of trying that I didn’t find my stabilizer until I was 25. My first asthma medication was Intal in a spinhaler. The grains tasted like chalk. Then it was Ventolin and Becotide sprays. Usually I went to primary school two days a week and couldn’t break into a gentle trot to the tuckshop without feeling the tell-tale tightening in my lungs. I hated the undignified wheeze that came from my body, the embarrassed faces of the other kids and the scramble through my schoolbag for my Ventolin. It always agitated me as much as the attack itself.The days I wasn’t at school, mum and I criss-crossed the suburbs in search of something other than being told I would grow out of it and should learn to swim. Chlorine and fear of water triggered attacks anyway. I endured 40-minute injections of Bricanyl, having my mum pound my back daily (to clear my lungs, supposedly) and a psychiatrist who said it was all in my head, and that my parents should buy me a dog to take my mind off myself. Mum used to buy me a Beatrix Potter or Enid Blyton book for every blood test or nasty consultation, and I could read newspapers by the time I was six.My parents bought a nebulizer and a seaside hotel in Tasmania to escape the dreaded Melbourne eastern suburbs asthma belt. The doctors said I would die; I flourished and reached the three-stone weight mark. I still had asthma, but nothing like it had been. I got sick of waiting to grow out of it. At ten I was able to tell a doctor that an intravenous Bricanyl injection would do the trick, or that half an hour on a nebulizer was all that I needed, and yes, I am allergic to Nuelin in any form. Doctors rarely credited me with any knowledge of my own condition, and still largely don’t.In Hawaii in 1979 I got pneumonia and was taken to hospital. I was separated from my family for two hours at the height of an attack and given the wrong dose of adrenalin. Later we were told it should have killed me, and I still remember the way the patterned wall tiles came to life and tried to creep up my legs. In New York in 1988 a casualty doctor flatly refused to believe my attack was bad, left me untreated for over an hour and then had to administer three different drugs in quick succession to keep me breathing. He managed to make me anaemic in the process. My friend sat in a wheelchair in the cubicle, and in between reading her Harold Robbins novel, took photos of me in various stages of treatment in case anything went wrong. Unbelievable as it may sound, some good did come out of this experience: at age 211 was told, for the first time by any doctor, that aspirin can trigger asthma attacks.Once I had a severe attack and we were out of Ventolin for the nebulizer, so dad went to the chemist. He came back two hours later, having stopped in at a friend’s house to watch the golf on TV. I was in hospital after that for five days. My dad was mortified. You should never be blase about asthma.The medication itself can be terrifying, even though you know it’s saving your life. After a heavy dose I lie in bed and my whole body feels like a huge heart, really pumping and speedy.When I first started thinking about planning for a pregnancy, the asthma prickled me — I used to be sure the Berotec and regular steroid doses were somehow getting together in my body somewhere and plotting against me. Plus there was the added concern that Berotec was being phased out in Australia and I had come to really depend on it. If I went to the milkbar without it, the panic would bring on an attack. I went to a specialist. My lungs were then functioning at about 40 percent. He told me to cut out dairy foods and prescribed a change from Berotec back to Ventolin, which had stopped being effective for me about ten years ago, and Becloforte. But the secret ingredient was the Volumatic, a large volume inhaler attachment — in unscientific terms, a round plastic tube with a slot for a puffer at one end and a mouthpiece to inhale from at the other. Because the Volumatic’s mist penetrates deeper into my lungs, the medication works quicker and far more effectively.This all sounds improbably easy, but within a week of the two-puffs-each, three-times-a-day routine, I was sleeping through the night, something that hadn’t happened for literally years. I could have a glass of wine and laugh and exercise without wheezing. Two months later I went back to the specialist — my lung function had doubled and was normal. The specialist told me to come back for a check-up in 12 months. I feel like the fat lady who has swapped her size 26 tent dress for a size 10 bikini.*59\148\2*

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