“Her smiles, her frowns, her ups, her downs
Are second nature to me now,
Like breathing out and breathing in…”
Henry Higgins (Rex Harrison), My Fair Lady
Except when breathing out and breathing in is NOT second nature. Like when you have asthma.
I was about 12 when I had my first severe asthma attack. We discovered just how allergic I am to menthol.
I was sick with something or other, and my “loving” parents thought they were doing me a favor by smearing Vicks Vapor Rub on me. This in spite of me screaming in pain, wheezing, coughing, and having to be held down spread eagled with one of each of them (mother/father/older brother/younger sister) holding down a limb. You would think they would get a clue. I don’t remember what happened, except I passed out, unable to breathe, and woke up several hours later with the windows to my room open and the nasty toxic stuff finally scraped off my chest.
Since then, I have had allergic-triggered and exercise-triggered asthma which I largely avoid by avoiding allergens and being not stupid about exercise.
I am allergic to a lot of things. I am allergic to bee stings, for example. One notable sting happened in the early Pennsylvania years when we were visiting someone with a grape arbor in the backyard. It swelled up to the size of an orange before I passed out. My left arm, I was told, looked like it had a grapefruit on it when the swelling reached its maximum. I have no memory of what happened after that. I only know that for years afterward I carried an EpiPen, particularly during my year at Temple Ambler, home of the Horticulture department and ergo home of the entire bee population of Southeastern Pennsylvania, or so it seemed.
We tried to treat my asthma with steroids early on after I had a job (and my own insurance). We discovered I don’t do well with steroids. I became hyperreactive to all the things I was normally reactive to, including what I term “everything green and growing” since just about every type of pollen and all cut plants cause some level of allergic reaction (yeah, mowing the lawn when I was a teenager was a real problem; I had to do only a quarter of the lawn at a time and cut over four days because I could handle neither the allergic exposure nor taking a red hot gas cap off the lawnmower to refill it). Unfortunately, the residual effect of that time with the steroids, which are supposed to be antiinflammatory but in my case obviously were aiding and abetting the inflammatory response, is that I can no longer tolerate any exposure to mint, menthol (which chemically is basically purified mint), or synthetic cinnamon. Think gum, toothpaste, hard candies, “red hots”, Altoids, just about anything with the Halls brand name on it since their #1 active ingredient is menthol, etc. Even less common things like cherry cough drops set me off. I itch, wheeze, and generally scare people. I’ve had enough allergic reactions over the years that my entire upper singing range is gone. I went from alto to second tenor, where I currently have about an octave and a half good left.
What more could one body have to go wrong? Stay tuned…