“Now that summer is just around the corner, I’m sure that most teens will spend their summer breaks sleeping in, hanging out with friends and playing sports. I personally love tennis and baseball. But I have asthma so I have to be careful. I don’t want to trigger my asthma by exhausting myself.
Having asthma is something you shouldn’t take lightly
When I get an attack, my breath gets shorter and shorter, and my lungs close up until I can barely breathe. In the past, I’ve run in the cold and got very sick. My asthma attacks were so severe that I had to go to the hospital. If I begin to start wheezing at anytime, I immediately take my medicine. If I ignore it, I’ll end up in the hospital or in bed for a few days. Having asthma is something that you should never take lightly—after all, if you can’t breathe, it can become a life-threating situation very quickly.
But having asthma does not mean that you have to avoid playing sports or exercising. You just have to be careful. That means taking your medicine (usually beforehand) and limiting activity as a precaution.
If I forget my medicine, I pay the price for it
Before I play a sport, I need to take my medicine as directed. If I do, my asthma usually will not bother me. But sometimes I forget and I pay the price for it. In tennis, sometimes my teacher would make us run a lap or so before we actually play. It was hard to remember to take my medicine, especially since sometimes I can’t tell when my asthma is kicking up. Sometimes instead of having trouble breathing, my stomach hurts or I feel extremely weak and tired. My doctor, Dr. Brenda Bass at Cedar Sinai said asthmatics often have stomach pains and feel weak when they are about to experience an attack.
To help gauge your breathing level, you can always use a peak flow meter. The one I use is about the size of a phone. I breathe into a tube connected to the meter, and it measures how much I’m breathing. According to the Asthma Information Center’s online website: “The peak flow meter is a device that measures how well air is moving out of your lungs. By checking your peak flow daily, you can avoid attacks because you’ll know about the narrowing of your airways even before symptoms begin.”
If you’re traveling this summer or perhaps going to summer camp, be sure to have your parents tell the camp counselors about the severity of your asthma. Sometimes on hot smoggy days, your asthma might flare up, so try to stay inside more on those days. The Asthma Center reports that all too often people who do not have asthma “…tend to minimize its importance. They may think that the child should ‘tough it out.'”
Don’t hesitate to ask for help
Don’t hesitate to tell people that you have asthma or are experiencing an attack. Asthma Center makes this statement, “…when a child is away from home, he may…resist taking them for fear of looking weak or awkward in front of relatives or friends.” I have felt that way. Once when I slept over my friend’s house, I told her that I had asthma, but I didn’t tell her that her pet bird, which she kept in her room, was starting to affect my breathing. Fortunately I made it through the night, but when I got home the next day I had one of the worst attacks I had ever had. I was sick for days. I had to stay in an air-conditioned atmosphere, rest and take heavy doses of my medication.
For more information, there are some great asthma-related websites, like The Asthma Center at www.mdnet.de/asthma or Allergy & Asthma,
www.allergyasthma.com.
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