How I Found Out I Was Ill...

To begin with I had asthma...probably why I was totally useless at games when in school because I couldn't run...especially when beefy girls with big thighs were chasing me on the hockey field...

But I managed well enough...Mother didn't care for us being ill so she ignored me when I used to say I couldn't get my breath...after a while I didn't mention it anymore.

Moving to Norfolk was probably the worst move we've ever made...surrounded by fields of Oil-Seed Rape and Wheat, I used to spend nights sitting up in bed gasping until I had the wit to go to the local GP...he handed me one of those cardboard tubes to blow in...waited patiently while I went scarlet with the effort and wrote out a prescription for a Ventolin inhaler...

Well...I thought I was in heaven...so long as I had my inhaler safe in my pocket I was grand.

I'd have a couple of puffs before carrying the clean linen upstairs or walking on the beach and managed well for the next eight or nine years. Never had any more tests and the inhalers were on a repeat prescription...

Then we moved here to Ireland and I found a reasonable Doctor who simply carried on where the English Doctor had left off...inhalers every three months and very rarely he'd hand me the cardboard tube...

It was when I caught an ordinary common cold...the sniffles and blocked nose and feeling rotten sort of a cold four years ago, that everything turned upside down...this was a different sort of difficulty to breathe...sent straight to hospital I thought they'd give me a quick blast on a nebuliser and I'd go back home...instead there followed days in bed on oxygen and feeling as weak as a kitten...intravenous anti-biotics that made me weep copiously...but...no advice...no x-rays... no suggestions about exercise...nothing.

It wasn't until I collapsed in a spectacular sort of fashion two years later and the ambulance men took me to a different hospital because it was closer, that all was revealed...a quite mad Consultant appeared at my bedside, once I was on a ward, and plonked herself down on my bed...all jangly earrings and a huge goofy smile...she told me tales about her birthing her first baby when she admitted to screaming the place down...about her husband, who'd been the man who fought to put a breathing tube down my throat...he'd been to see me while I was in the ICU...a lovely kind man...and then she introduced the plain fact of my having COPD...she explained clearly and concisely and told me I'd be meeting with anyone and everyone who could possibly help...

For the next ten days I had bloods taken and chest x-rays...the dietician came and the physio...a nice old chap brought me a wooden walking stick...the highly harassed stop smoking lady came...told me the Doctors were the very worst for giving up the dreaded weed...I was attached to machines that bleeped all night long and kept everyone awake...and more machines that cost the earth and didn't work.

Several weeks after being discharged I received an explanatory leaflet and accompanying letter from another Consultant telling me I had the genetic form of COPD...some of the blood tests had revealed it.

Now I have that Consultant, rather than the eccentric Kathy who flirted outrageously with the young men in her team and wafted a cloud of expensive perfume in her wake, she was prone to suddenly swoop on me with a hug...while her handsome young men from all corners of the world shuffled their feet and smiled...perhaps they were wishing it was them...

Suddenly the GP takes me seriously...he's grand but I always had a sneaking suspicion he thought I was 'putting it on'...now he carries my oxygen bottle and says to call him at anytime. He asks after the donkeys and shows me photos of his dog on his 'phone...

That has been the story so far.