Coping with asthma during sports

Hi all,

I use to have asthma when I was very young but it seemed to almost vanish when I was 10. Four months ago I came down with a very bad cold and a nasty chest infection, and it seemed to trigger off my asthma once again. I had only just started college so this was a bit of an inconvenience. I went to the asthma nurse and I got put back on medication and all seemed fine.

Recently however, my asthma has been getting progressively worse and I have noticed I can't do straight forward things without my chest tightening up and feeling out of breath.

I am a big lover of sports and I play for the school's netball team and I love it. There was an incident at training 3 weeks ago where I was wheezing and coughing quite bad. My friend asked our group we were working with if I could sit out, with the response ""oh yeah use the asthma excuse"" later adding ""i'm only joking"". This made me very upset and ever since, I have felt so bad about myself. I feel like at every match and training session I have to prove to her as well as everyone else that it isn’t which is causing me to have some very bad asthma attacks.

I haven't told my coach or any one of my teammates about this, only my friends and they just say, ""she was only joking"" and ""let it go"" but I just keep feeling like I’m a waste of space (I suppose I am somewhat in denial with my asthma). I wanted to ask for your advice and guidance, and if you have had any similar incidents.

Thanks for taking the time to read,

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Don't feel bad about yourself because someone made an insenstive coment, it just shows how thoughtless this person was. I'm sure if they had an injury or something they'd need to take a rest too, and not want any unhelpful comments come their way.

I think it's worth talking to your coach about this, they should be able to help you with this. It shouldn't be an issue at all to be able to stop when you need to, take your reliever and rest for a while before joining back in.

When I was in school and college I played lots of sport; hockey, netball, badminton, athletics and crosscountry. In fact, I did sports science at college, even though I had severe asthma at the time for a few years and had many trips to hospital with it. After I'd talked to teachers, lecturers and coaches about it, none of them had a problem with me dipping in and out if I needed to.

And if the coach doesn't make a big deal of it then the rest of the students shouldn't be bothered by it either. If any of them make things awkward then tell the coach too, as I'm sure they like a team that support one another. The one person to make me feel really bad about it was my english teacher for missing lots of his lessons which was after my PE lesson.

You should also go back to your asthma nurse or GP, tell them that your asthma is affecting the activities that you do. There's more that they can do med wise to get your asthma better controlled so that you can take part in sports without symptoms.

Good luck with it all. X