A few weeks ago I had an incident – not terrible, but not something I was prepared for, either. One of my less active conditions is mild asthma. It predates my diabetes, and is activated by strenuous exercise and certain weather conditions. When the air gets heavy, but it hasn’t started raining yet, the dense air tightens my lungs. I take daily medication for it, and I have an inhaler for emergencies, but I haven’t needed it for a good decade.
This week I needed it. My building’s worst feature is false fire alarms going off way too often. Once a faulty wire tripped the sprinkler, once it was just a random alarm set off for no apparent reason in one of the pump rooms, and more than once it has gone off due to someone doing renovations. The fire department comes, checks where the alarm was triggered, and clears it. I usually wait to see where the fire trucks park before I walk down 20 flights of stairs. It helps me figure out whether the issue is serious and whether it’s in my building.
This time the truck parked in an unusual place away from both buildings. Since I didn’t know what that meant, I started walking down the stairs. My neighbor wasn’t far behind me. We were both wearing masks. As we walked down, we discussed what might be happening. It all seemed pretty weird to us, especially since the fire alarm started skipping – stopping every 15 seconds or so and then starting again just as we decided to walk back up.
Around the 14th floor, I stopped to check whether the building had sent out any messages. It was getting ridiculous. Lo and behold they had. The county utility had asked the building to switch from gas to oil in the heating system, and that triggered the alarm. There was no danger. But the alarm had been going off for 20 minutes. We were all already out of our apartments.
Pandemic restrictions on elevator capacity meant that it was going to take forever, so I began to walk back up. Unfortunately, between my lack of fitness, the lack of air circulation in the stairwell, and my mask, my asthma was triggered.
It was a stretch, but I made it back to my apartment before I took off my mask (the hallways and stairwells were both going to be busy enough with everyone returning that it would have been a pretty big risk to take it off). A couple of puffs on the inhaler and everything was back to normal.
Sort of.
In the next couple of weeks, every time I wore my mask, my lungs tightened. They (my lungs) were never thrilled at the prospect of a mask. It took a while for them to acclimate to the new reality, but they did, helped along by my use of disposable masks. The cloth ones were too tightly fitted.
This was different. Worse. I started carrying my inhaler again. And I thought about it.
It was not likely that after years of the same dosage of the daily treatment, it was suddenly insufficient. It happens, but these things are usually gradual. And the timing was suspicious. It magically became insufficient right after my first incident in years?
No.
I suspected that the psychological association I now had with my masks was playing head games with me. Psychosomatic symptoms are real*, but exacerbated or created by stress or other psychological factors.
Once I realized that my brain was causing the problem, I started meditating in an effort to clear my thoughts before I went out and then distracting myself once I was out. It worked and after a fairly short time, my asthma went back to actual normal.
I was lucky. This was an extremely minor issue. Psychosomatic symptoms can be much more serious than that. If my easy solution had been unsuccessful after a short time, I would have called both my GP and my psychologist. The brain is a powerful organ. Sometimes you need help when it goes down roads that aren’t productive without you.
*Psychosomatic symptoms are often used to delegitimize what is happening to a patient – “it’s all in their head”. But these symptoms are never to be dismissed. Even if they are created or exacerbated by what’s going on in your brain, and hard to recognize, that something needs to be taken seriously and treated.