Asthma
I'm so excited, today after a couple puffs from my rescue inhaler an hour earlier, I was able to walk home really fast and get short of breath from exercise / lung capacity, rather than short of breath from asthma. Eeee! (Yeah, I'm even more out of shape than I usually am, since I've been walking at a little old lady's pace since the Hunt b/c to anything faster triggered my asthma.)
It's so weird learning new sensations in my body, and it doesn't help that I'm not figuring this shit out until I'm 37.
Reminds me of learning to wiggle my ears in elementary school. I noticed that when raising my eyebrows, or when wearing sunglasses for a long time, I could feel something in my ears. I decided those were probably my ear-wiggling muscles, and that from then on anytime I got bored in class I was going to exercise them. So I did, for like the next year. At first it was really hard to isolate just those muscles from the rest of my face, like my eyebrows, but I just kept trying. After all, class was boring, what else was I going to do? I wasn't even sure that I was right, that those were my ear-wigglers, until one day a boy in my class suddenly cried out, "Hey, you can wiggle your ears!" And I was vindicated.
Now I can actually wiggle each one separately, though I can't yet raise only one eyebrow. I'm working on the left one though. Give me a couple years, as I've got less boring classes nowadays, and those are easier for someone else to catch you at while ears you can hide in your hair.
The weird thing about the asthma, is it's not muscles, it's sensations.
I mean, the lungs are muscles. Through my years of chorusing I've learned how to breath from the bottom of the lungs / diaphragm (which's also what the doc means when they say "take a deep breath", basically you want the bottom of your ribcage to go out sideways) rather than from the top of my lungs (what usually happens when people are panting, and the top of your chest heaves up and down).
But the difference between asthma and other stuff isn't what you're doing, it's how it's feeling. If you've never done that pin test, give it a try: hold two pencils or pins right next to each other, and poke them together on your fingertip. Very clearly two separate pencils right? Now instead try the back of your hand, or your shin. You probably can't tell that it's two points. If you think you can, have a friend help you test it, and they'll poke you with either one or two in different spots, and you have to figure out if it was one or two. The asthma I've been experiencing is like that, in that you KNOW they're two different things because your doctor tells you they are, but you can't actually tell that they're different. But it's also like the ear wiggling, in that with practice and attention, yes I *can* tell them apart.
So asthma cough vs. normal cough. Normal cough is a tickle in my throat. Asthma cough pushes up from the top of my chest / lungs, or is a tickle in this weird indeterminate place between the throat and the lungs. And like, inside my body in 3D, it's really weird mentally to picture, other than cramps I'm not used to sensing things inside rather than on the surface of my skin. I mean seriously, even muscle cramps feel like they're on the surface.
Asthma shortness of breath vs. normal shortness of breath. Asthma shortness of breath is a tightness / mild pain / coldness in my upper chest / upper lungs. If I push my hand against my chest on both sides like where you feel the heartbeat on the left but on both sides, or like massaging my pecs, or around where I feel heartburn the rare times I've gotten it (from antibiotics), the warmth makes the asthma shortness of breath feel better. In some ways this's reminiscent to like if I get a muscle cramp, not in the level of pain but in how you can feel it's just wrong and now how it's supposed to be. Normal shortness of breath (like from exercise) to me feels like I just don't have sufficient lung capacity, like when I take a breath in and I not only heave up my chest to expand the tops of my lungs, and broaden out my lower ribs and diaphragm to expand the bottoms of my lungs, and I still want to go further but I can't, I just can't take a deep enough breath. (Though to be fair, sometimes my exercise induced asthma also feels that way, but that's not the specific asthma symptom I'm having right now.) This reminds me more of how if you've exercised a muscle for a long time it gets weak and you can't pull or push as hard with it, like how after rock climbing a bunch I have difficulty opening doors b/c my finger muscles just can't.
At this point it's still easier for me to ID the coughing asthma that I'm currently experiencing, than the shortness of breath asthma, just b/c coughing's a distinct event. But on the plus side, it's slowly improving due to the steroid inhaler I'm on until ... um, I forget when? But when it's out of doses and it's got a counter on it, so then. A month total though.
Originally posted on Dreamwidth.
comments there. Comment here or there.
It's so weird learning new sensations in my body, and it doesn't help that I'm not figuring this shit out until I'm 37.
Reminds me of learning to wiggle my ears in elementary school. I noticed that when raising my eyebrows, or when wearing sunglasses for a long time, I could feel something in my ears. I decided those were probably my ear-wiggling muscles, and that from then on anytime I got bored in class I was going to exercise them. So I did, for like the next year. At first it was really hard to isolate just those muscles from the rest of my face, like my eyebrows, but I just kept trying. After all, class was boring, what else was I going to do? I wasn't even sure that I was right, that those were my ear-wigglers, until one day a boy in my class suddenly cried out, "Hey, you can wiggle your ears!" And I was vindicated.
Now I can actually wiggle each one separately, though I can't yet raise only one eyebrow. I'm working on the left one though. Give me a couple years, as I've got less boring classes nowadays, and those are easier for someone else to catch you at while ears you can hide in your hair.
The weird thing about the asthma, is it's not muscles, it's sensations.
I mean, the lungs are muscles. Through my years of chorusing I've learned how to breath from the bottom of the lungs / diaphragm (which's also what the doc means when they say "take a deep breath", basically you want the bottom of your ribcage to go out sideways) rather than from the top of my lungs (what usually happens when people are panting, and the top of your chest heaves up and down).
But the difference between asthma and other stuff isn't what you're doing, it's how it's feeling. If you've never done that pin test, give it a try: hold two pencils or pins right next to each other, and poke them together on your fingertip. Very clearly two separate pencils right? Now instead try the back of your hand, or your shin. You probably can't tell that it's two points. If you think you can, have a friend help you test it, and they'll poke you with either one or two in different spots, and you have to figure out if it was one or two. The asthma I've been experiencing is like that, in that you KNOW they're two different things because your doctor tells you they are, but you can't actually tell that they're different. But it's also like the ear wiggling, in that with practice and attention, yes I *can* tell them apart.
So asthma cough vs. normal cough. Normal cough is a tickle in my throat. Asthma cough pushes up from the top of my chest / lungs, or is a tickle in this weird indeterminate place between the throat and the lungs. And like, inside my body in 3D, it's really weird mentally to picture, other than cramps I'm not used to sensing things inside rather than on the surface of my skin. I mean seriously, even muscle cramps feel like they're on the surface.
Asthma shortness of breath vs. normal shortness of breath. Asthma shortness of breath is a tightness / mild pain / coldness in my upper chest / upper lungs. If I push my hand against my chest on both sides like where you feel the heartbeat on the left but on both sides, or like massaging my pecs, or around where I feel heartburn the rare times I've gotten it (from antibiotics), the warmth makes the asthma shortness of breath feel better. In some ways this's reminiscent to like if I get a muscle cramp, not in the level of pain but in how you can feel it's just wrong and now how it's supposed to be. Normal shortness of breath (like from exercise) to me feels like I just don't have sufficient lung capacity, like when I take a breath in and I not only heave up my chest to expand the tops of my lungs, and broaden out my lower ribs and diaphragm to expand the bottoms of my lungs, and I still want to go further but I can't, I just can't take a deep enough breath. (Though to be fair, sometimes my exercise induced asthma also feels that way, but that's not the specific asthma symptom I'm having right now.) This reminds me more of how if you've exercised a muscle for a long time it gets weak and you can't pull or push as hard with it, like how after rock climbing a bunch I have difficulty opening doors b/c my finger muscles just can't.
At this point it's still easier for me to ID the coughing asthma that I'm currently experiencing, than the shortness of breath asthma, just b/c coughing's a distinct event. But on the plus side, it's slowly improving due to the steroid inhaler I'm on until ... um, I forget when? But when it's out of doses and it's got a counter on it, so then. A month total though.
Originally posted on Dreamwidth.
comments there. Comment here or there.