““Come to me, all you who are weary and burdened, and I will give you rest. Take my yoke upon you and learn from me, for I am gentle and humble in heart, and you will find rest for your souls.”  Matthew 11:28-29 NIV

When I was a teenager, one of my biggest joys was to make my mom laugh. Mom had a difficult life. She had a son with a developmental disability and a husband who drank too much and was not around. And then…she had me. I wasn’t a bad kid, mind you. But I am convinced I had ADHD and was quite the handful…always into something and using my smart mouth to my disadvantage at every turn. So, when I got old enough to discover I could make her laugh, I did so at every opportunity.

Somewhere along the way, I realized when she laughed hard, she would go into a coughing fit. It’s normal to have some coughing after laughing hard as the nerves that control laughter are the same as those that control coughing. As a clueless teenage, that only added to the mirth, but as an adult, I now realize she had a “reactive airway”…a non-medical term that is kind of a placeholder for asthma that hasn’t been diagnosed. 

I have the same thing. It usually doesn’t give me any trouble unless I exercise in the cold, or I get a particularly bad cold and the virus kicks my airway into hyperdrive. I tighten up and cant breathe. I cough till I hear the blood rushing through my ears. Usually, the cough is unproductive, meaning I can’t get anything to come up. There is a whole regimen to follow when this happens, but it has been so long since it’s happened, I forgot what it was. Beside the steroids, which I truly do not like, there are inhalers to use…one that is a rescue inhaler that immediately starts to open up an airway that is locked down in spasms, and the other that carries a steroid that treats the lining of the bronchial tubes and eases the inflammation.

The very best thing to use is Mucinex. I don’t know why I didn’t even think to try that last week. I’ve been taking antihistamines all summer for allergies so my lungs were sort of like wet cement. When I got so sick Friday night, it was like trying to breathe through a wet sponge. Once I got the steroids and breathing treatments and some antibiotics in my, I could breathe again. Then the Mucinex finally kicked in and…well, without getting into gory details, let’s just said there was a lot of clearing out the pipes in my my lungs and I can now breathe much freer.

You do not know how bad you have felt until you feel better. I was telling Mr. FixIt yesterday that this is the first time all summer that I have actually felt like I want to get up and go do something fun. I battled gastritis and other stomach issues since last spring that really put me down. Anything I ate upset my stomach and I constantly had a gnawing pain in the upper area of my abdomen. The happy little side effect of all those medicines they gave me in the hospital seems to be my stomach issues have cleared up. No more pain. No more nausea. And, I ate a cheeseburger for dinner last night and it didn’t kill me! 

I share an awful lot of personal stuff here, I know. But I figure if others have some of the same grief symptoms I have and I can help with that, maybe there’s someone out there suffering with the same sort of stomach issues that can see a doctor and get some help. I’m not a doctor and I can’t recommend treatments, but I can share what happened to me and hope it helps others. As Ram Dass says…”We are all just walking each other home.” ❤️