I have tried time and time again to conquer my asthma, but it's one of those diseases that no matter how much you accomplish one silly little molecule can take you right back to step one. Take my last two major episodes for example: Last July I was out with my friends and my bestie and I decided to take a shot of Jameson. (I'm a normal girl!) So we order our shots, take them and the next thing I know I'm coughing... no... choking... and I spit out my shot all over the place. My friend looks at me and walks away (as if nobody would remember that she was with me... we're best friends at a neighborhood bar). I keep coughing and suddenly I realize that I am secreting ungodly amounts of mucus and that I am having a full on asthma episode. I grab my friend's boyfriend who grabs my boyfriend who is having a hard time really grasping what just happened except that now my best friend is yelling at him that I need my nebulizer. So we go home, I take my medicine and then I'm out of work for a week while my overworked lungs repair themselves.
Or my most recent episode: I'm feeling totally on track, working out at least 3 times a week, go out for a community dinner and BAM! I catch a little virus that within 3 days has me laid out and back on a full course of prednisone (that both magical and evil medicine)..
Speaking of, let's chat about asthma treatment plans. The thing about being a lifelong asthmatic is that you have a tendency to forget what it was like to get a diagnosis or to begin that treatment plan because it happened so long ago and the process has changed. For example, when I was a kid there wasn't a computer in every doctors office, let alone a spirometer.
The basics of an asthma treatment really haven't changed too much and I can't stress how important it is to put one together with your doctor. After some time, that written plan will just become second nature and you won't think about writing it down anymore. However, always make sure to keep it in mind and make sure your family and friends are aware of it as well. Making sure that my friends are aware of my condition and the basics of what to do has probably saved my life more times than I can count.
A typical asthma action plan looks something like this: has a safe zone, a caution zone and a "red zone." There are many many formats of this and your doctor probably already filled it out with you.
The ultimate idea is to keep you in the "green zone" as much as possible so that you don't have to take the measures put forth in the yellow and red zones. That is what integrated asthma is all about, finding ways of living in the green zone as much as possible and recovering well when we step through the yellow and red. By the way, this particular treatment outline is just a random image I found online. If you visit your doctor, they will have their own or you can print out the format that you like best from the CDC website.
The biggest issue that I have with asthma treatment plans is that while they provide all of the life saving information that I need if I dip into yellow and red, it leaves me kind of bumbling around on my way back to green. And that's where really good communication with your doctors come in as well as a more integrated approach. That's what this blog is really about. Making sure that as an asthmatic I do everything that I can to stay in the green zone. Asthma is a very dynamic disease and that means there are some times when you will need more medicine than other times or you will react either positively or negatively to certain types of treatments and need adjustments.
I have a team of doctors behind me to help me along the way and I will be calling upon them to assist me with this blog. My goal is to make sure that I provide myself and my readers with as much accurate and responsible information as possible.
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