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I began to have trouble breathing about two weeks ago. In and of itself, this wasn’t a huge cause for alarm, given that I’ve had mild asthma ever since I was a child. But in the wider context of a worldwide pandemic, where respiratory issues are a key sign of very bad things to come™, and ventilators have become an everyday topic of conversation, it felt a little more pressing than usual.
To be clear, I didn’t have any other symptoms. No fever, no cough, no body aches that I hadn’t accepted as part of the ageing process, but as each day passed, I started to worry more and more that something was seriously wrong with me.
You probably won’t be surprised to hear that this made me feel a million times worse. Every time I felt anything out of the ordinary with my body or my breathing, I would feel a small surge of panic.
In no time I found myself reading the news a little more obsessively, noting the minute fluctuations in my body a little more neurotically, and having daydreams about ventilators and full-body immersion in hand sanitiser, that it’s probably best not get into here.
It wasn’t until I focused on what was actually happening with me, not on what I was imagining, or what was going on in the rest of the world, until I acknowledged that my inhalers were doing their…
