We Have Mother Nature on Line One? Something About Holding Your Breath…

Word around town is that breathing is non-advisable for us hothouse-flower types today.

I don’t need the Air Quality Index to tell me that.

All I have to do is inhale.

You hear that? That slightly wheezing sound? That’s me. I’m either imitating an accordion or my asthma is being poorly managed.

Breathing is one of those things you don’t think much about. Like sweating or growing hair, it’s not until you’ve gone too far in one direction or another that you realize that the body has been doing these things all on its own, thank you very much, up until, oh, NOW.

Now you need to add it to your list of things to do, something like this:

Buy groceries (with extra Fresca)
Do load of whites
Shave the cat’s butt
Breathe in and out, in and out

Turns out I’ve been taking unassisted breathing for granted.

And that got me thinking about all the other things I’ve just assumed were mine. Sure, there’s hair growth (wanted and unwanted). The blogosphere is a a-twitter with the hair migration routes of the aging, i.e., from head to back, from eyebrows to chin.

I’m not worried about the hair: I’ve pretty much got that one covered in that Mary has promised to keep an eye on my face if I keep an eye on hers.

We’re to alert each other of unseemly hair sproutage.

And teeth! Won’t someone please think of the teeth? I had assumed – erroneously, as it turns out – that my teeth were here to stay. So far, so good. The teeth remain, but the gums have other ideas. Seems they’ve had enough of me and are thinking of ceding from the union.

As a survivor of the great gum recession of ’08, I feel it my duty to tell you: If the dentist at any time suggests that the dental work you are about to have done could be done in halves or in quarters as a method of pain control, you’re in trouble.

Take the half-mouth option, contact your friends with chronic back pain and access to Vicodin, and get ready for a Lord of the Rings or similar marathon.

You ain’t goin’ nowhere.

Asthma, however. Breathing. Yikes. Well, this is fairly new to me, having only been diagnosed with it four years ago.

And of course, as any thinking human would, I promptly quit smoking three and a half years later.

So far, it’s not so bad. It’s not until the days where the skies seem particularly murky, when my right-brain thinking has me swimming to yoga rather than walking to it that I feel the heaviness, hear the wheezing and start rooting around my bag for my inhaler.

A quick hit, and I’m back to breathing like a normal person.

Still.

Had I been given the option for asthma, I would have declined.

As a matter of fact, I'd like to go on record as standing four-square against the entire aging process.

I was just fine the way I was.

Sigh.