Asthma afflicted my health my entire life, until recently. Though I was never hospitalized during an asthma attack, I remember, in my childhood, nurses sitting by my bed in my room at home, ready to administer medicine. I have vivid memories of many debilitating episodes when I was incapacitated to helplessness, my body wracked by uncontrollable gasping for air,my fear of suffocation turning into panic. Nightmares of drowning, of suffocation, were my most frequent dreams, during which my mind struggled to wrest itself out of the grasp of the nightmare's fright and rise to the surface of waking consciousness.
I took all the most advanced medicines, finally ending my struggle with asthma with eighteen years of treatment with several steroids, managed by multiple daily readings of a lung capacity gage, emergency inhalers, and ordinary anti-allergy medicines to control my allergies which contributed to my asthma and frequently triggered episodes. Several years ago, at my daughter's wise urging, I turned to alternative medicine practiced by a naturopathic doctor. Radically different therapies, centered on removing foods to which I was sensitive, digestive supplements, and homeopathic remedies quickly ended my asthma, reduced my lung inflammation, and brought an end to my lifelong struggle with my crippling malady.
Exercise has become an important part of my recovery. Exercise as therapy required a paradigm-shift in my thinking, for exercise had always been part of my asthma problem, not a solution. Violent exercise would trigger asthma, and asthma episodes would always, nonetheless at unexpected and unwanted moments, force me to cease whatever physical activity I was doing. Central to my current exercise regime is Pilates. At my wife's urging, I enrolled in a Pilates program three years ago. My teacher, a former ballet dancer and dance instructor, helped me gain the muscular strength and stamina I need to work through exercises. She patiently waited for me to outgrow my self-defeating attitude, that I could never do any physical exercise routine, because my asthma would intervene, so why bother.
I was one of the few men enrolled in her classes. She was initially reluctant to give me the hands-on instruction she gave to her women students. With them, she would touch their bodies, identifying the muscles she wanted an exercise to strengthen, or moving her hands along their abdomens, torsos, and backs, explaining the sequence of motions and their timing with breathing inhalation and exhalation. So I told her one day, she could touch me, that I wished she would, because it would help me understand the complicated exercises she wished me to execute.
For some of her students, including me, she engaged the assistance of an osteopathic physician, a woman, who came to the studio. The physician had also been a professional ballet dancer and a friend of my Pilates teacher twenty-five years ago when they danced together. Dr. Ballet, my instructor and we students call her. The physician examined me, and the other students who became her patients, to identify muscular and skeletal misalignments and dysfunctioning muscular routines that interfered with normal Pilates exercise. Dr. Ballet pulls, pushes, rotates, stretches, compresses, bones and muscles, gradually realigning my body. I lie on a padded bench, a pilates reformer, while she pulls my arms and legs, climbing on top of me to use her body weight to offer resistance to my muscles and to arrange bones and joints the way she needs for correction. Her hands and body are warm. Her breath is sweet. She gives me a few simple instructions, how to move, to press, to release.
As the doctor does her work, I feel my body begin to align and move properly. I relax. Tension dissipates. I sit and stand with my pelvis aligned. When I stand, my right side of my torso does not collapse. My shoulders are not hunched. My spirits sigh with relief. Every firm, knowledgeable touch of the doctor's hands makes me feel better. I feel safe. I am being put back together. My body will not fall apart.
At the end of my most recent session with Dr. Ballet, I confided in her with an early memory. When I was perhaps four years old, I had a horrific asthma attack. It was prolonged. My medicines and inhaler did not bring me relief. Though my mother was a practical nurse, she did not have a hypodermic needle with epinephrine. For some reason, she could not contact our family physician. She became desperate. My gasping, struggling for breath, wheezing, flailing around, crying for help, must have been frightening. She called a friend, a regular nurse, who suggested that she take me to a chiropractor. My mother put me in our family car and drove me thirty miles to the chiropractor.
My question to Dr. Ballet was, how was the chiropractor able so quickly and completely end the asthma attack? I remember going up the stairs to the second story of a building in the commercial downtown. I don't remember whether I walked up the steps or my mother carried me. We went into the chiropractor's office. The hallway and the office, at least in memory, seem relatively dark. The chiropractor was a woman. My mother took my shirt off, then the chiropractor and my mother laid me, stomach down, on a bench. I remember the chiropractor's warm, strong hands begin to push and press my upper back. Suddenly, and it was instantaneous, my asthma attack ended. It was over. It was as if my lungs had received an enormous blast of albuterol. I lay exhausted with relief on the table.
Dr. Ballet said, the chiropractor manipulated the T2 and T3 vertebrae, which manipulated a nerve that controls the lungs. It seems so simple, I thought. I thought it had to do with her hands, with the warmth, the pressure, the confidence, the knowledge. To touch is to control. To tame the beast. To tame me. That's what I thought I learned in that old office in an old building, long ago.
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