 .....To be perfectly but embarrassingly honest, the first time my asthma showed up, I wasn’t too bright at diagnosing what was happening. In fact, I completely blew it.
.....You see, it was during the middle of the night, and well, I’d had a bit too much to drink the evening before (only red wine for my cardiac health, of course, but hey! Just to be sure not to suffer a heart attack that night, I had downed 2 more glasses of plonk than usual), so when I heard something that sounded eerily like wheezing and that had partially woken me from a deep slumber, I sleepily turned to my wife and angrily mumbled, “Hey, you better get that checked soon because that noise is waking me up,” after which I turned over and tried to go back to dreaming |
 |
of the Canucks winning the Stanley Cup. Well, you know how unrealistic dreams tend to be.
.....But before I could drop off, I heard a distinct “Moron,” coming from my wife, which you may be surprised to learn didn’t really get much of my attention mainly because that’s her pet name for me. At least that’s what I prefer to believe.
.....“No, I mean it,“ I said still 3/4 asleep and my back still turned to my simmering spouse. “You’re wheezing and you may have asthma. Get it checked in the morning, OK?”
“You moron,” she repeated, this time with what even I could detect was not a whole lot of love in her voice. “You’re the one who’s wheezing, not me. And it’s not the first time you’ve done that, either.”’
.....Moi? Wheezing? And more than once? Well, that certainly got my undivided attention, and I instantly shot up to realize that my wife’s non-professional diagnosis was absolutely correct – the quite audible wheezing in our otherwise silent bedroom was indeed coming from my own airways, and it no doubt also explained why I was feeling tight in the chest.
.....I tell you that anecdote for 2 reasons. Yes, asthma does lead to wheezing, although everything that wheezes is not asthma (more on that later). Equally important, asthma is often not an easy diagnosis to make, even if you’re a brilliant diagnostician like me. |
 |
.....So what is asthma?
.....Actually, it’s not as easy to define as you may think mainly because two distinct (but completely inter-locked) changes occur in asthma. Thus, we’ve long known that the airways in asthmatics go into spasm in response to some sort of “insult” (see below), which leads to the telltale wheezing that anyone but a sleepy, slightly tipsy doctor could instantly recognize as a sign of airway spasm.
.....But what also became clear only a couple of decades ago is that the airways of asthmatics are chronically inflamed, that is, asthma is actually a condition of chronic inflammation, albeit one with periodic acute flare-ups, and that rather recent realization has produced a sea change in how asthma is now approached.
.....The best way to think of asthma, then, is how the Canadian Lung Association defines it, that is, asthma is a chronic disease that makes it hard to breathe. Yes, other chronic conditions also make it hard to breathe (emphysema and chronic bronchitis, for example), but the bottom line for asthmatics is that the combination of airway spasm and inflammation make it hard to breathe and that’s all that really matters to an asthmatic and his/her caregivers.
.....For reasons that are still quite unclear, asthma seems to be increasing at an alarming rate, especially among kids. For example, a Canadian report |
WHERE PEOPLE COME
FIRST
