Essentials of Breathing

This blog is really about my life as a woman who grew up having to be on a respirator. Bear with me, my friends! For those of you who are very physically fit and have never experienced chronic illness and do not understand medical stuff, please excuse me. This may not seem to apply.


In this post, I'd like to take you into another world for a moment and have you imagine a woman in her 20s struggling to breathe. Her body has changed from a child's to that of an adult in a matter of two years and she didn't see it coming. The somewhat agility of her childhood body rapidly disappeared as the stiff inadaptibility of a woman's body took hold. Her lungs suddenly became increasingly comprised and the severity of her scoliosis would make it increasingly difficult for her to breathe without the constant assistance of a respirator.


How does breathing affect our quality? What does it feel like to not be able to breathe? What does it feel like to slowly lose oxygen in your body?

Many of us don't think about how breathing plays an important role in the body's function. Breathing is taken for granted. If you cannot breathe, oxygen is not able to flow through your respiratory system and throughout the rest of the body. Then your blood does not get oxygenated.  If your blood is not oxygenated, then it can cause a part of your brain to stop functioning. This can cause the rest of your body to shut down because the brain sends signals to the rest of your muscles and tells particular muscles when to move. Lack of oxygen and failure of blood flow can slow or even shut down the kidneys, intestines, pancreas and liver resulting in the dysfunction of the urinary and excretory systems. This can the waste in the body to back up and can have major health consequences.


When you can't breathe, it feels like you are suffocating and gasping for air. You try to take deep breaths to take in as much as you can but all the while you end up breathing hard, taking very shallow breaths. Your lungs get very weak - maybe even stiff - and they feel like they are caving in on you. Your breaths are so shallow that the CO2 is never exhaled completely and replaced with good air. Thus, the CO2 begins to rise and you become exhausted. Eventually you go to sleep! If you're lucky you wake up in the ICU of a hospital.


It is a very frightening experience. One minute you are breathing pretty well and the next you are out cold. Well, there is a brief period of time before you black out where you might feel very weak and exhausted - so tired that you ask someone to feed you every meal because it takes too much strength to lift your arm, to hold a spoon and try to get the food onto it, and then to lift the spoon with food on it and put it in your mouth. Keep in mind, you are struggling with all your energy to keep breathing. Every ounce of your strength is dedicated to making sure you take one breath at a time and to making sure you do not leave this world too soon.


Thank God for negative pressure!