When Your Lungs Fill Up With Sea Water

I actually have – had – an acquaintance who died during an asthma attack. Ava Elliott, her name was. She was a nurse. Think Chummy Browne from Call the Midwife. Ava was similarly good-humored, square, and clumsy. Scion of a wealthy family who I suspect put the thumbscrews on so that she would marry and beget. My take on her was that she was gay/gay/gay, but this is the 80s we’re talking about. Anyway, I think she chose nursing as a profession because it gave her ample opportunity to hang out with foxy women. Sometimes in their underwear.

I liked her well enough. Never knew her all that well. Was shocked/shocked/shocked to discover several years after I left the nursing profession that she had died. Status asthmaticus. Who dies from that?

Well, actually, about 10% of people who go into status asthmaticus. Mortality rate is high.

Ava was much on my mind yesterday as I struggled to breathe.

The asthma is actually getting worse. But, really, there is nothing “they” could do besides put me on a theophylline drip in an ER.

I went out for an hour or so yesterday and the cold air seemed to help.

There is a huge psychological component to asthma. The more you obsess about it – I can’t breathe! – the worse your breathing gets. So I’ve been forcing myself to do absolutely nothing besides drink tea (contains bronchodilators), snort inhalers, sip port wine (contains bronchodilators), sit in the bathroom and inhale hot steam, and watch Netflix. I figure at this point the exacerbation is all psychological – the same obsessive/compulsive tendencies that make people pick at scabs – and if I can just not allow myself to get anxious for 24 hours that I’ll be over the hump.

When I was a kid, sometimes my asthma would get so bad that I’d wake up in the middle of the night and think my mother had left the radio on, and it was tuned to a weird alien music station. The rattling and humming and squeaks my lungs got so bad.

Being on something of an R. Crumb retrospective, I watched the Terry Zwigoff documentary again, and that was fascinating and also an artistic call to arms in a way. Through no particular effort on his part, Crumb grew enormously popular and (one hopes) rich. But really, he’s the consumate outsider artist. He drew for his own amusement or enlightenment or compulsion, and throughout most of his career, he did not give a fuck if his artwork struck a chord with other human beings or not. He’s deeply kinky, enormously politically incorrect and horrified by political correctness in all its manifestations.

I have a prerehearsed rant, which I can unleash at a moment’s notice – Wanna hear it? No? You sure? Well, here it is in a single pithy sentence anyway: There’s a real difference between self-expression and art: Art makes a conscious effort to communicate.

Watching Crumb, though, makes me think this theory is bullshit.