Breathing

I have been living serious times, health-wise. Like some of you know, I am a multi-conditioned one, having more than one life companions (I mean chronic diseases). I am all the time balancing between them. The one that has become a major cause of trouble and a cause of increasing worry has for the last months been asthma, steadily getting worse all the time. These last weeks I have been in a state where I have not known if I will wake up the next morning anymore or not. Several times I have been woken up from a state where I have not been breathing anymore. It has been frightening. I have not been able to climb up stairs without an asthma attack. I have not been able to do practically anything without an asthma attack. And the past few weeks, I have had an ever-increasing feeling thet the attack medication is not biting any more.

I found out Lyrica, which I have successfully taken for another chronic life companion, fibromyalgia, can cause broblems in breathing, and can actually seriously worsen asthma symptoms. Not for everyone, but for some. - If you don't know fibromyalgia, it is a nasty but not life-threatening disease which among other things keeps your muscles stiff, causing you sometimes even unable to move, and still worse, it keeps you in constant, serious, all-over pain. Lyrica helped me, like it helped many others. It did ruin my diet and cause a colossal weight gain but I thought it still did more help than damage. Many others have also been complaining of colossal weight gain when starting to take Lyrica.

There was a time, a few weeks back, when I was taking steroids - yet another time! - for asthma symptoms that had gone really bad. I was getting more and more - and more - swollen, and counghing my lugns out. I felt that steroids would soon kill me in that swollenness, that I would suffocate of it if then asthma would not make the same before that. I stopped taking steroids and started to feel a bit better but something was still seriously wrong. I could not walk, even slowly, and talk at the same time, for instance.

Then yesterday evening I had had enough of it all and I took only 150 mg Lyrica, instead of the full 300 mg dose. I did not sleep very well. This morning I took another 150 mg, instead of 300mg. And you guess it - I can breathe. I can climb stairs and I do cough but I dont get an asthma attack. I would not consider climbing up and down the stairs yet but perhaps I will do that too.

I have a devilish head-ache, my feet are burning and I have a tingling pain in every joint. After a major shock caused by my daughter who had a lamp fall on her and got her hands bleeding and then we had to treat her shock and pain first and the scars then - my legs deceived me and I had to drink sugar for shock symptoms myself, and go to bed. But otherwise the day has been a wonderful one because I have been able to breathe again.

All is well as long as you can take breathing for granted. I have not been able to do so for a very long time. I cannot tell how good it feels to be able to inhale and outhale without problems!