Smoke, Asthma, and Interesting Google Searches
As of June 27th, 2019, there are 122 fires in Alaska, with about 17 being over 2,500 acres. That is a lot of fires, and makes a LOT of smoke. It’s been about a week since we’ve been able to see the mountains from Anchorage (which are so close they’re normally in your face). The smoke also brings around health problems for a great deal of people, myself included.
Saturday was not a fun day for me. I woke up with a stuffy/runny nose (the kind that comes with allergies) - but that was fixed with Allegra. Then, when I had to leave the house to take care of some work, my chest started hurting. I shrugged it off, and kept working. As it got worse, I took out my inhaler and took a few puffs. When that didn’t work, I noticed that it was expired - like three years expired (way to go Megan)! With it being Saturday, I decided that I’d push through the asthma attack and be fine. Then, I started to get shaky (without any caffeine in my system) and nauseous.
About two hours later, I wound up in the Urgent Care trying to get a new prescription for an inhaler. What I ended up needing was a full breathing treatment AND an inhaler. The doctor said that my lungs had already started to close, and the bottom of my lungs were not getting oxygen. So there I sat, for 10 minutes inhaling this mist through a breathing tube, with nothing to do but think.
But think I did.
One of the things the doctor said was that if I had listened to my body and come in earlier for that prescription, I wouldn’t have needed the breathing treatment and the rescue inhaler would have been enough. The shaking and vomiting were signs that my body wasn’t getting enough oxygen. It was my body saying it needed my help. This sounds like a very familiar line.
If you would have only listened to your body…
It sounds an awful lot like some other sayings that people say when they regret doing or not doing something. It sounds kind of like “if I would have only listened to my [insert gut, heart, head, intuition, etc…]”.
It’s human nature to tend to ignore the common signs that something isn’t right. That, more often than not, gets us into trouble. Even though we often ignore the physical signs of a situation, we apparently think and talk about “following our gut” all the time.
I did a quick Google search on the following terms, and wound up with an alarming number of search results:
“follow your gut” - About 218,000,000 results
“follow your instincts” - About 28,500,000 results
“listen to your body” - About 1,400,000,000 results
“listen to your gut” - About 74,900,000 results
“listen to your heart” - About 1,420,000,000 (ok… this one might not be applicable, there are a lot of results around the song “Listen to Your Heart” by Roxette…)
Even though the last one might not be as applicable, this still paints a pretty painful picture. Listening to what your body/mind/spirit/intuition/gut is something that is HIGHLY discussed, and a talent that many people WANT to have. We read about it, listen to podcasts and TEDTalks about it, but most of us never try to embrace and practice implementing it. I know I’m especially guilty of it when it comes to my health (which is apparent from my opening discussion in this post).
However, I want to challenge you to not only read those articles and listen to those podcasts, but try and practice listening to your gut feelings. The next time you have butterflies in your stomach, don’t ignore them. Try to feel them and think through what your body is trying to tell you.
