Breathing Easy Again: How I Got Rid of My Asthma at 50

The Flying Frisby

(NB: At the end of this piece there is a short note on Lightbridge Corp (NASDAQ:LTBR), which has tripled since I covered it a fortnight ago).

I have suffered from asthma for as long as I can remember.

Others have it worse than me. I had always been able to manage it with drugs – salbutamol mostly – but, all the same, there was always that lurking thought that if I forget my inhaler and have an attack, I could be in trouble.

Then, suddenly, in my early 50s, it disappeared.

It is not uncommon to grow out of your asthma. It happens to a lot of people. But my asthma was not getting better; it was getting worse as I grew older. I can’t prove it, but I think I got rid of it. Here is what I did.

How Bad Was My Asthma?

As is quite common for people my age, I was not breastfed as a baby – science thought it knew better than Mother Nature – and the allergies I suffer from – the main ones being to animal hair and pollen, which result in hay fever and asthma – are a result of that, I’m sure. It’s part genetic too: my dad had asthma but grew out of it in his adolescence. None of my four kids, who I’m delighted to say were all breastfed, have it.

There were two main triggers: animal hair, cats especially, and exercise. Sometimes going from warm to cold (e.g., going outside in winter) would bring it on, and it was worse during the hay fever season.

As a child, we had cats – Persian ones too – and we didn’t get rid of them until I was nine. I can’t believe it took that long to figure out I was allergic to them; whenever I left the house, my asthma noticeably improved. But I took drug after drug every day, morning, noon, and night – Intal and Ventolin.

We moved and got rid of the cats, fortunately. As a teenager, I got quite strong and fit: I played a lot of rugby and football. I found I could get through matches without needing the inhaler at all. But cats would always destroy me. Within ten minutes of being in a house with cats, I would be wheezing. I was just so sensitive to them. Prolonged exposure would take a day or two to recover from.

It was so frustrating going to people’s houses and having to leave because of my asthma, or having to sit there and wheeze, while the owners scrabbled about putting the cat outside or hoovering. Made no difference. Every year on Christmas Eve, I would have the annual asthma attack when visiting my uncle and aunt.

As I got into my late 20s and 30s and the fitness of my youth waned – not helped by smoking too much weed at university – I found myself needing my blue inhaler (salbutamol) more frequently again to play sport.

By the time I got to my 40s, I often found myself getting wheezy for no apparent reason, and I was using the blue inhaler almost every day.

Doctors advised me to use the brown inhaler – QVAR (beclomethasone) – every day, rather than salbutamol, and the brown did indeed clear it up so that I didn’t have to use the blue. But I don’t like taking drugs every day, and every time I tried to wean myself off the brown, I found my asthma had got even worse. I was too dependent.

By my late 40s, I was quite overweight, and even though I did a lot of aerobic sport – running and football – I was heavily dependent on puffers.

We had a dog too, and even though it was a hypoallergenic poodle, I was still sensitive to its hair.

Alcohol made my asthma worse, especially red wine. Also, if I drank, there was always the risk I would then smoke, which of course made it bad the next day.

Here I am today, and I have not used a puffer in maybe two years. I play football most weeks, tennis sometimes, I run, and do sprint training and cycling, including hill training.

But this week came the acid test. I went for a drink at a some friends house, and they have a cat. I spent a very long evening there and did not leave until 3 AM. No puffer required. I went back the following day and spent several hours there. No puffer. Then again two days later (I really like these friends!). Still no puffer. My nose didn’t even run.

I could still feel the allergy. But I was not remotely wheezy.

For me, this is quite extraordinary. Fifty years of asthma have gone.

How Did I Do It? (Plus a Note on Lightbridge)

I’m going to spell out all the things I did. It might be that it was a combination of all of them.

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