I Could Be Wrong, But...
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Breathing Lessons
©1998 David Boyne
In the middle of the night, Jack awakened, struggling to breathe.
I awoke his mother, asleep with me in the next room, and in one flowing motion she was up and awake and rushing to her son and his unnaturally strained calls to her.
She gathered 5-year old Jack in her arms. She told me that it was an asthma attack. And a bad one.
Before that night, I had no experience with asthma. I did not even think of it as a disease, but as a nuisance easily controlled by over-the-counter concoctions being endlessly pedaled on television. I did not understand that as recently as my grandfather’s time, asthma was an indiscriminate killer of adults and children.
As I drove the three of us to the emergency room, the darkness held back by the beam of headlights felt like an ocean wanting to crush us under fathoms of blackness. Hearing Jack bleat, cough, gag, and strain for a clear breath, made my own throat hurt each time I swallowed. Jack whimpered, frustrated for just one deep breath. Yet, he was still a boy of five, sleepy, crying, stunned and straining to simply breathe—but he was also assured. He was in his mother’s arms.
Read the rest of Breathing Lessons in the ebook, Quo Vadis, Dude?
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