The Girl Who Ate Everything

Hack.

Cough.

Wheeze.

12 hours later...

...wheeeeze.

Okay. When you start wheezing before you go to bed, triggered by a misplaced cough (well, most of them are misplaced), and you're still wheezing in the morning, you know you have troubles.

Just when I think most of my friends are pretty healthy, I find out that they were born with some kind of physical anomaly. "My hormones are screwed up." "My backbone isn't shaped correctly." "I'm allergic to every nut in the world, they will KILL ME, OH GOD THE NUUUTS!" Compared to them, my health problems seemed nonexistent.

My worst problem that I've had for my whole life as far as I can remember is asthma. There have only been two times in my life that I remember having to breathe through some kind of machine because it had gotten really bad (when I was little) and I stopped having to use my inhaler frequently ever since I moved from Taiwan back to the US (not that I used it a lot there, but I needed it to the point that it was a permanent resident of my school backpack). I don't think I've ever been near dying from asthma, although I still remember one time in 6th or 7th grade that I could hardly breathe while walking with my friend back to her apartment in Taiwan. Perhaps I was able to decrease my need for oxygen until we reached her home, where I immediately went for my inhaler. Or maybe the decrease oxygen did something to my brain cells. (That would explain a lot.)

So I'm pretty well off, even with the asthma. I don't have to take drugs for it or get any regular treatment. I was most asthma-free while I was a raw foodist, which was rather nice. Unfortunately, asthma has been coming back ever since I started eating cooked food. I guess it's not that cooked food causes asthma but by eating raw food, most food was cut out of my diet and I didn't eat whatever was most likely to cause my asthma.

The last time I had to use my inhaler was about 9 months ago when I was in England with my friend. Her health problems fully eclipsed my asthma, as she also had a bit of asthma, and food allergies, skin problems, maybe hair problems...but she functioned perfectly fine. I mean, we had great fun until we crossed the line from semi-health human beings to snot factories; we somehow both became incredibly mucus-filled and spent out nights incessantly blowing our noses and filling her miniature wastebasket (we could've used one of those huge kitchen ones) with mountains of used tissues. Sweet.

During that trip, I decided to stop eating biscuits and Shreddies (mm, Shreddies) since I figured that couldn't have been helping my asthma but do I regret eating the craploads of ...er, crap, beforehand? Not at all. So now I wonder if it's worth it to just go back to a mainly raw food diet and hopefully rid myself of asthma if that means giving up most of the food that I like along with any activities related to eating the food (like going on food hunts in NYC).

I'm thinking that it's not, but asthma is pretty annoying. I don't have it that bad, but here's what triggers my asthma:

• talking on the phone - Seriously, this triggers it most of the time, but not always. My mum said it's stress related since I don't really like talking on the phone, but there are people I like talking to that still trigger my asthma. I'll admit that I don't get asthmatic talking to my mum since I'm obviously comfortable talking to her. Don't think that you can't call me because I'll get asthma as it doesn't happen all the time, just more than 50% of the time.
• coughing - This usually triggers asthma but sometimes if I cough a lot, it with ultimately just dislodge all the mucus in my lungs (god, how much is in there?) and I'll breathe fine. But it takes a while and I feel crappy beforehand.
• cold weather - Walking in freezing temperatures tends to make breathing difficult, which I have such FOND memories of during 9th grade when I had to walk from the student parking lot with my brother to the school building, taking about five minutes and resulting in WHEEZING ROBYN by the time I got to French class.
• climbling stairs - Climbing a few flights, mind you. My house has a few stories, which doesn't do anything to me, but in school I can't seem to climb more than 3 flights of stairs without feeling like death by the time I get to the right floor. I feel lazy taking the elevator to the 4th floor, but oh well.

So today I'm just eating honey. I don't know what I'll do tomorrow. Obviously plenty of people function fine with a few health problems, but my friends and I are still young. Who knows what'll happen to use when we get older. I'd hate to become dependent on any drugs (I haven't taken any kind of medication in the pharmaceutical sense besides my inhaler in...years? As in, I don't take over the counter stuff like Advil or Tylenol--I've never needed it badly enough) so I guess I should work on my health now. Now that I think about it, that was the main reason I did raw food. Of course, weight was a huge factor but that was marginally behind the asthma and mucus-blob...thing.

My lungs feel okay now. I guess if my British friend and I hadn't been so physically incapacited we wouldn't have come up with the cry, "My lungs jiggle!", which would've been a real shame.