I watched the kid struggle for air. His lips were blue with oxygen starvation and his eyes were red and bulging. He was wheezing pathetically and coughing up thick mucus every few seconds. His mother, on the park bench beside him, had him bent over and was thumping his back. It seemed to help a little, but not much.

Asthma? I asked. She nodded disconsolately.

Doesn’t he have an inhaler? I asked, fumbling for mine. I always carry it my lungs close up without warning on damp mornings. She explained that they had finished his salbutamol inhaler the night before, and the pharmacies would open only in an hour. We gave her son two hefty puffs on mine and within seconds the asthma attack subsided.

I have lived with this hellish disease all my life. During my childhood in Germany, my uncle would take me to an egg-shaped oxygen chamber at the local hospital when it got too bad. We would sit in there for an hour, he reading the papers and I getting a breather that would see me through that day. At other times, I had to submit to steroid injections that would help, but make me feel as though I was swimming through cotton. Salbutamol inhalers, the primary emergency asthma medication today, had not been invented yet. My mother would give me steam inhalations at home, usually with some eucalyptus oil mixed in, and I would get a lot of relief with that.

No one really knows why some people get asthma and others don’t. We do know that it can be inherited  and sure enough, my grandmother had it. The triggers differ from patient to patient with me it is pollen, dust and cat hair. For that matter, I can’t touch dogs or cats without feeling that iron band settle around my throat and chest immediately after. Asthma is an allergic reaction of the airways, which become inflamed and constricted.

Mine got a little better after my teens, but it is still very much part of my life. The kid in the park has better options than I did those many years ago. Patients can be desensitized to the trigger allergens today when I was a kid, such a concept was pure medical science fiction. There are better medicines available, too. But asthma is a living hell when it is at its worst, and it can effectively wreck one’s childhood. I couldn’t take part in sports or even play normally and had to avoid all sorts of foods. I thank God for my inhaler now, but wish that I’d had it back there in Hamburg thirty years ago.