Do you suffer these allergic asthma symptoms?
I’ll never forget the day my doctor suggested I might have asthma. Who me?! I thought (well, actually, said aloud!). I didn’t have allergies or asthma so how on earth could I have *allergic asthma*? Ridiculous!
And then he started telling me why that was his diagnosis. The wheezing that I experienced during the height of the pollen wasn’t just a cold coming on. The tightness across my chest wasn’t just stress from working too-long hours at the computer. The out of breath feeling I got when taking long walks in the Spring wasn’t that I was out of shape (whew!), it was all allergic asthma.
Like I say, though, I didn’t like my diagnosis. In fact, I tried to ignore it for a long time. I took antihistamines and pretended my breathing didn’t bother me at all. Pretended I could breathe normally even when I was completely out of breath.
And then I started having panic attacks. Nothing serious, I told myself. Just two or three times a year. I’d hyperventilate and my breathing would get completely out of control and I still told myself it was all stress and that I just needed to take better care of myself.
Ugh! No wonder my body was reacting so strongly. I was completely, utterly ignoring it. And all the while, my allergic asthma got worse and I started experiencing more and more symptoms.
Finally, about a year and a half ago, I realized I had to face facts: I had allergic asthma and it was time to do something about it.
Now, I’m no doctor, but here are the symptoms you should definitely talk to your doctor about:
- Coughing
- Wheezing
- Shortness of breath
- Rapid breathing
- Tightening of the chest
For me, I had a very severe pain right at my sternum. I was quite certain it was entirely stress (my computer had conked out a week before, and I was trying to put everything back together again while running a full time business). But my mom insisted I see a doctor. And the doctor poked and prodded and seemed entirely confused by my list of breathing-related syptoms in tandem with my insistence that I definitely, positively, could not under any circumstances have asthma.
So, instead of just telling me I was crazy, he was a very good doctor and ran a couple of other tests to rule out the other possibilities and then announced, “It’s possible it’s something else, but I really think you have allergic asthma.”
And he wrote me a perscription for a couple different kinds of medication, printed up some information for me, and set me up with a checkup for a few weeks later.
I didn’t fill the perscription. (Which always makes me feel terribly guilty but it’s actually really common–lots of people don’t fill their perscriptions. Now don’t you feel better?)
Instead, I started doing my own research about allergic asthma and I started to pay attention to my symptoms and to what I was doing that seemed to exacerbate them and what I was doing that seemed to make them better.
And wouldn’t you know it, now that I had an actual name for what was going on with my body, I actually found a lot that helped! A lot that didn’t help as well, but mostly I was making good progress and my breathing was getting a lot easier and a lot more painful.
I should stop at this part in my story to say this: This is just MY story. You need to talk with your doctor and together you and your doctor need to determine what’s best for YOUR health. It’s very likely that yours and my health histories are very, very different and what worked for me might very well work for you as well, but obviously I can’t know that, so: You + Your Doctor, got it?
This is getting long, so I’m going to wrap it up. What I’ll be doing on this site is sharing exactly what I did that helped ease my allergic asthma symptoms. Will these same things work for you? I dunno, but I do know that I genuinely believe if you are ready to have better breathing, and you are willing to work with your doctor on this and give your body what it needs to heal, you *can* have great health and easy breathing. I genuinely believe that.
I’m really excited about sharing what’s worked for me to relieve my allergic asthma symptoms!