Breathing 2…

I was aching all over.

A feeling I’ve had before but must’ve forgotten!

Not ill, I had no fever, but I felt as though I’d been lifting heavy furniture and lugging baggage across an airport forecourt.

Which I hadn’t.

I was just aching.  So I drank water and continued with my life.

“You seem to be walking faster,” I complained to Daughts when she was out with me.

Stopping to catch my breath in front of my favorite pecan tree I looked up,

Breath

“You’re feeling it too,” I said to its bare branches, brittle and quivering in the bitter cold.

I returned home after an hour, breathing shallowly and collapsed into a chair.

“Must be getting old,” I commented to Hubs, ‘or the freezing temperatures are messing with my bronchials,’ I whispered to myself as I pressed my hand against my pounding chest trying to calm my heart.

Later, as I sat on the bed transferring pertinent information from last year’s diary into this year’s, I noticed the date of my last inhaler.  Apparently it had been going strong for 3 months; a whole month longer than prescribed.

“Maybe I made a mistake on the date or missed recording the new one,” I thought.

Curious I went to retrieve it from my drawer and squirted a puff into the air.  Out came a feeble cloud of powder.  I depressed the top again and nothing.

I shook my head, “No wonder!” and threw the empty canister away.

A few full doses of Flovent later I was feeling so much better and by the next day I was energized as I briskly out-walked Daughts and tramped off to survey the effects of the rains on our border creeks.

Breath2

Rising rapidly the free-flowing water leapt from level to level trapping air-pockets into a foamy wash and sprinting with me to the large lake at the bottom of our fairway.

I took a deep, refreshing breath and wondered why I’d forgotten how enlivening oxygen was?          

I still ache (after all I’d been putting my body through its paces with no help from my huffer) but I was no longer fighting for every breath.

I was buzzing and dancing like the water at Footlights.

As a lifetime asthmatic you’d think I’d recognize the warning signs and know better than to allow oxygen deficiency to ravage my body; you’d think I wouldn’t fall into the ‘take-it-for-granted’ pool of denial,

toning my blue lips with red lipstick,

blaming the cold temperatures for the tightness in my chest,

excusing my exhaustion on account of my age.

It wasn’t until I switched out calendars and was prompted to check the contents of my inhaler that I realized…

…breathing…

… is not gasping.

 

 

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Elray

2019-01-28 14:01:41 Reply

I’d rather it me than you that suffered this.

    Vivienne

    2019-01-29 01:01:26 Reply

    I don’t think so..!!

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