It all started with a cold.

Even the smallest upper respiratory infections turn an

asthmatic’s life into hell. Anything that goes to my chest is nearly guaranteed to get me started

on a coughing spree and develop into a more serious lung infection like bronchitis or pneumonia.

I remember lying in bed in our Brooklyn apartment in the middle of a chilly October

night, oxygen saturation falling to 85 percent, and my RN mother waking me out of my half-

dozing stupor and calling 911. Everything moved at a snail’s pace, and every inhale of breath

was like trying to suck in air through a coffee straw.

I often get asked what asthma feels like. It’s different for everyone, and it depends on the

particular attack or flare-up. Usually, it’s as though there’s something heavy sitting on my chest.

Other times, it’s like someone is gripping me around the neck and squeezing harder and harder

with their fleshy fingers. Even now, I can’t bear having my neck touched, nor do I wear tight

turtleneck sweaters in the winter. For eleven years, I refused to wear scarves.

That night, a paramedic and an EMT came banging on our door, blue nitrile gloves

already on and asking if I needed help getting down the stairs from the fourth floor to the lobby.

Even thirteen-year-old me was too prideful to allow herself to be carried. I walked with the

EMT’s hand firmly wrapped around my upper arm for support.

I made it outside to the eerie quietude that fills New York streets at three AM and sat on

an awaiting gurney. The paramedic started me on a nebulizer treatment—one of many I had

already tried taking. The bright lights in the back of the ambulance made my eyes sting, and I

started to cry. My entire body convulsed as the paramedic tried to soothe me and put her hand on

my knee—a spot of warmth within the ice-cold shock.

 I was diagnosed with asthma when I was three-years-old, and while I always knew it had

the potential to be fatal, I had never felt the weight of what that meant until then. For the very

first time, dying seemed conceivable.

Everything hurt. When the body is in survival mode, it becomes hyper-sensitive. Each

breath made my chest ache like someone was trying to stretch it out like a rubber band. My

collarbone was protruding and I could feel the muscles struggling to relax beneath it. My mind

was muddled. My reaction times were two seconds late. I wanted to sleep but thought I’d never

wake up.

I was happy to be going to the hospital—it seemed safer than home. I’ve always had

profound faith and respect for medical professionals, since both my mother and sister are

registered nurses, and every time my weak immune system would fail in the past and make my

lungs burn with pain, a nurse or a doctor never failed to help me. Medicine was always there for

me—my sanctuary when everything else was falling apart.

The one positive of not being able to breathe is that you never have to wait to see a doctor

in the ER. Respiratory or cardiac distress instantly bump you up to the top of the priority list—

bonus points if you’re brought by ambulance—so I was quickly brought to a bed. A pediatric

pulmonologist hovered around me. He had a sleeve over the tubing of his stethoscope with

yellow ducklings on it, which I guess was meant to put the five-year-olds he would examine at

ease, but it made my early teenaged self even more embarrassed. I was at that age when one’s

biggest worry is being regarded as a child and not a young adult.

He was good-humored and clearly comfortable around children. He started me on more

albuterol and then steroids, and every time he came back to check on me, he would ask, “Are

you feeling any better, honey?”

 I’d shake my head and croak, “No.”

As optimistic as ever, he would flash me a smile and joke, “You’re killing me here. What

am I going to do with you?”

I was wondering the same thing.

He ordered a chest x-ray and informed my parents that my cold had developed into

pneumonia. Not long after that, he announced I’d be going to intensive care.

“They’ll be able to look after you better there,” was his reasoning, but I had become an

expert at disseminating medical talk from all of my previous encounters with doctors, and it

sounded to me like I think you’re too sick to be here and might have to be intubated.

Now the true fear was setting in. I’d never been in the ICU before, and it didn’t sound

like it would be fun.

The new critical care doctor responsible for me was the elusive attending physician in the

pediatric ICU—the kind of doctor who usually sits in an office somewhere, and you never hear

from them unless someone is on the verge of death, as they normally send a resident or a

physician’s assistant to deal with it.

The attending physician was a stocky, middle-aged black man in wire-framed glasses

who exuded competence but was in no way as comfortable with children as the pulmonologist in

the ER. He asked my parents a lot of questions. When he was finished with his interrogation, he

finally peered at me over his glasses as though I was a science experiment that had gone wrong

but could easily be tinkered with and said, “Don’t worry, kid, we’ll fix you.”

He placed me on a BiPAP ventilator which shoots oxygen into your lungs and makes

every exhale feel like it’s being suctioned out. The mask that came with it felt like someone was

vacuuming my face off because of the intense pressure. I kept thinking, This is it, I’m going to
die. I want to sit with my friends in the school cafeteria again. I’ll never write Jonas Brothers

fanfiction again.

My parents went as far as to have the priest from the Catholic church we attended come

and bless me—anointing of the sick, it’s called, and it normally happens when you’re dying of

old age or cancer.

“May the Lord in his love and mercy help you with the grace of the Holy Spirit,” Father

Thomas said, tracing a cross with his thumb on my forehead.

After a round of antibiotics and non-stop albuterol and oxygen over the course of a

week, I improved. The attending physician dutifully checked in on me. A few days into my stay,

he started lightening up. I think we bonded over my spiral into anaphylactic shock—he

attempted to give me IV ceftriaxone for my pneumonia, and my throat promptly began to close.

He flushed epinephrine into my IV, examined my throat, and joked with one of the nurses that

my dilated pupils made me look like I was doped up on cocaine. In retrospect, that probably

wasn’t the ideal joke to make in front of a child who had just experienced a severe allergic

reaction, but I found it funny nonetheless. New Yorkers have a very specific and very vulgar

sense of humor.

He watched me like a hawk after that incident and said, exasperated, “You’re a special

case full of surprises, aren’t you?”

By that Saturday, I was being discharged.

It’ll soon be eight years since that hospitalization. I didn’t know how precious my life

was until I thought it would be taken from me. All of the things that happen on the daily—

arguments with friends or family, missing your bus or train, heartbreak, hating your job—it’s

meaningless. When you’re left staring at the ceiling and every breath feels like another nail being
hammered into your coffin, you forget all of that stuff. All you crave are the stupid little things

you love about your life, like morning cups of coffee and biking across the Brooklyn Bridge, or

being so in love with a song that you want to get up and dance in your room.

I see the physician who treated me walking outside of XXXXX Hospital for his lunch

break sometimes, white coat safely tucked away in his bag as he goes into Dunkin’ Donuts, and I

wonder what it would be like to go up and talk to him. I know he doesn’t remember me, but I

remember him. What would I say?

“Hello, sir, thank you for not letting me get intubated when I was thirteen and for saving

my life. Can I buy you coffee and a donut?”

That’d be weird, wouldn’t it?

“I know many people don’t take the time to thank you, so thanks.”

Thanks for helping me see how much I actually love my life.

Maybe someday, I’ll finally have the courage to tell him.