inquiring parent

Every Breath You Take

Lolo was born a little early – three months and two days to be exact. We’re incredibly lucky, not just because she survived, but because her only obvious the long term repercussion was a tendency to get asthma whenever she got a cold. You might notice I’ve used past tense. I can’t say for sure she won’t asthma again, but I’m optimistic. 

It wasn’t always like this. There was a time when we had a fold-out bed permanently ready in our bedroom for those nights when she was taking sixty breaths a minute and I feared each one would be her last. 

I wanted to avoid steroid inhalers, so we tried all sorts of complementary therapies. For a while homeopathy seemed to control the attacks but choosing the correct remedy was challenging to say the least, and strangely enough, asthma attacks don’t always come when your homeopath is at home, waiting for a frantic mother to call!  Lolo ended up on oral steroids so often that the preventative inhaler became essential. Even so, by the time she started school she was getting more prolonged attacks with every cold. 

Then I read about a woman whose asthma had healed with the Buteyko Method of breathing. Buteyko was a Russian doctor who discovered that people with asthma were over-breathing – sounds crazy but several clinical trials have shown his technique to be effective in reducing asthma. The theory is that when we over-breathe we lose too much carbon dioxide, and it is essential for getting oxygen from our haemoglobin into the body. When we exercise or when we get stressed our breathing naturally increases. That’s fine, so long as it settles back when the exercise or danger is over. Of course, nowadays the dangers we face are rarely things we need big breathing for – that bear of a motorist you’re so mad at isn’t actually a bear at all, but your body breathes big, ready to bop him over the head or flee like the wind. And so, meeting bears on a daily basis on the way to work, you breathe in just a little too much over a long period of time, and that’s how you end up with a big breathing habit. (With Lolo it probably started because she needed ventilating as a baby, and because of lung infections she had in her first few months of life. I’ve also seen her go into an asthma attack after getting upset and angry.) 

There was no Buteyko teacher in our city, so I didn’t pursue it. Then after Lolo had once again missed a week of school I rang any teacher within sixty miles, and one was willing to come five days in a row to teach Lolo in our home, provided we paid his petrol – an indication of the passion Buteyko teachers show. 

Lolo was less passionate about doing the exercises. We persevered, and for almost two years she got by without an attack. We reduced her inhaler, she seemed to manage. 

But she didn’t see why she should do her exercises when her sister was playing or reading a book. Her ‘Steps’ were just an annoying thing that her annoying mother asked her to do, and if she spoke in the middle of them or opened her mouth and took a huge gulp of air, then her totally annoying mother asked her to do them all over again. Not cool. And her annoying mother sometimes got annoyed too, so now there were two people having tantrums and flouncing about the place. If Daddy wasn’t at work it was easier to get him to supervise; he didn’t usually make her redo them if she cheated, he often didn’t even notice the sneaky breaths she took in the middle when she was supposed to be holding her breath. 

The asthma came back. My thoughts ran something like this: I’m a failure. It’s my fault because my anxiety stresses her too, and that’s why she has asthma. Buteyko’s nonsense anyway, it doesn’t really work – I was just grabbing at straws, and so what if there have been clinical trials that show its effectiveness, it’s not working for us. I look such a fool, since I’ve told dozens of people it works. It’s all my own stupid fault, and I might as well give up and just accept she’s going to be on a steroid inhaler for the rest of her life. And on and on… 

But I do The Work, so I knew I didn’t have to believe any of those thoughts. 

I’m a failure – is that true? Hmm, now I think about it: two years asthma-free could be considered a success, and this attack was mild compared to what she used to get. And let’s not take this quite so personally, just how is it ‘my’ failure or success really? 

How do I react when I think this thought? I feel like giving up, which of course would make me even more of a failure in my mind. I feel angry and guilty, and want to find someone else to blame so I don’t have to feel that guilt. I imagine people sneering at me, saying what an idiot I am. 

Okay, I can see that lot’s pretty stressful. So who would I be without this thought? 

Hunting through the magazine I read a few days before to find the phone number of a Buteyko teacher who now covers this city. Taking Lolo to see her for a refresher course. Discovering it wasn’t so much about success or failure as about learning from mistakes and moving on. 

Lolo learned too. She learned  that if she opens her mouth in the middle of her steps and takes a sneaky breath then she’s cheating herself, not me. Days later we discovered that she had a belief, “I’ll never to able to do it.” And when we looked at that belief she discovered there was no way she could know that, and that believing it made her not want to try, made her feel like – guess what – a failure, angry, and thinking, “It’s not fair.”

Without the thought she would just do her steps and see what happened. 

And what happened was she gradually began to do more and more, her breathing got better and better. Two months ago she could only hold her breath comfortably for five seconds, now she usually manages between thirty-five and thirty-nine seconds.  She swam a width of the local swimming pool underwater a couple of weeks ago. (About twenty metres.) She can hold her breath longer than I can now, considerably longer. She has a cold just now, and so far, no asthma. 

In the interests of balance I’ve been surfing the internet reading about various trials and opinions on Buteyko, and what I found was a huge number of sites with evidence it works and a few that say we don’t know enough yet to know that. Usually the doubters also say it seems to work for some patients so long as they are willing to put in the effort required to do the exercises. In other words it’s easier to take a puff on an inhaler, but easier for how long and at what cost?

It may not surprise you that LB and I are now doing the exercises – they can help with a lot more than just asthma. I’ve been doing them for a week now, and I notice a difference – I went for a run a few hours ago, and didn’t puff and pant and need to breathe through my mouth. I can’t pretend I’ve found it easy; I’m still getting used to breathing into my abdomen (I breathe too high) and the exercises have brought some interesting beliefs to the fore. Yes, one of them was “I’ll never to able to do it,” and no, I don’t feel guilty that I passed that belief on to my child, just pleased that we can do The Work on these beliefs as they appear. 

If you are interested in knowing more about Buteyko, there are teachers in many parts of the world. I found this article particularly good at explaining why it works.

http://www.buteyko.co.nz/buteyko/work/default.cfm

I also recommend this article by Una Mooney, which provides an illuminating explanation of development of asthma in young children. 

http://www.buteykoinscotland.co.uk/children.htm