How to Turn 40

My whole life has been one lung problem after another. I was the kid that always had the booming cough. I was the kid who would run out of wind, no matter how good a shape I was in. I was the teen that couldn't keep up with the others when they ran along the beach. I was the teen that had trouble breathing out of her nose enough for a really good snog. I am the adult whose cough fills the rink from end to end. I am the adult who has other shrinking away in fear of catching some awful disease. I am the adult who, at almost 40 just found out that all these years I've been suffering from borderline asthma...enough to keep me less active than my peers, enough to have me convinced that my immune system was poorly at the best of times. How does that happen? How do you make it through so many years, showing the same signs over and over again, without a single diagnosis for asthma???

I'm hoping to be able to breath again next week, for the first time in, well, for the first time in my life!!! No longer will dusty ball fields and cold rinks send my bronchiole tubes shrinking and shrieking in horror...I wonder what that feels like? I wonder what it's like to be able to breath like normal people...when all along I thought I was normal people????