Back when I was in high school, attempting to participate in sports while my coaches (and, as it would later turn out, my gym teacher) turned a blind eye to the asthma symptoms that I was blatantly exhibiting, my cross-country team was working on “gearing up” for the mile that almost all of us would “master” running. As it turned out, I would be one of the very few students, if not the only student, that would not ever succeed in running the mile — not only were the symptoms of asthma that I were blatantly exhibiting being ignored to the tune of no one even bothering to tell my parents that I had them or was struggling to perform in athletics or physical education, but during my first, last, and only run, I stopped to help a friend of mine that had tripped over a hidden pit, spraining her ankle in the process. Because both of us had stopped, we were disqualified. My cross-country coach insisted that all of us would “be successful” in running the mile if only we would get over the “mental block” that must have prevented us from doing it, and it still incenses me that not a single adult in a position of power even stopped to recognize the symptoms of asthma that I had been exhibiting, let alone give my parents a phone call to let them know. As mentioned in previous entries, my parents would not find out for more than a decade that my coaches and gym teachers had either turned a blind eye to them or intentionally ignored them. This was another reason that I just hated my high school…

I say this like I do because one of the things that I had wanted to do, and would like to do if my health would allow it, is run. But it is one of the things that my lungs will, full stop, not allow me to do. There’s absolutely no way that my lungs would ever allow me to do that. They have made it abundantly clear over the years that there is no training, or “getting over the mental block”, to successfully run. My asthma is too severe — especially my exercise-induced asthma — to oxygenate my muscles to allow me to run. There absolutely is no training my lungs, my body, or my mind to successfully run any meaningful distance other than an incredibly short one if I have to grab Bub if he makes an elopement attempt. There are no marathons. And that’s something that I have had to make peace with, time and time again, every time that I think about it. But again, for my coaches — in the positions of power that they were in — not to have done something about my asthma, even if it were to recognize that attempting to participate in athletics was not something that I should do, still angers me to this day when I think about it. My school really should have done better.

There was no “mental block” to get over when the problem was a disease that was never going away.