Everybody take a deep breath

I’ve always really appreciated breathing. I know, I know, everyone likes breathing, after all it’s what keeps us alive and kicking but my enjoyment of the respiratory function goes way beyond just keeping the old lungs inflated.

It started way back when I was just a child. Apparently my mother came across me in my crib one night, just in the nick of time, since I had succeeded in crawling to the bottom of the bed under the covers where I became stuck. When she pulled back the blankets I was soaking wet, gasping for air and, to say the least, disoriented. To this day I have a difficult time using blankets at night and prefer only the lightest of sheets. This also creates an ancillary problem since She Who Must be Obeyed prefers to use a sheet, a blanket, a duvet and, in the winter, an electric blanket before she can drop off to sleep. Needless to say we have reached a compromise, which consists of two separate mattresses and separate sheets to avoid undue thrashing about.

Some years later, while attending high school, I had another run-in with oxygen deprivation. I wandered into our grade nine chemistry class, vacated only minutes before by a bunch of grade eleven students, only to discover a glass beaker with a strange looking, slightly green gas inside. Now, always being of a curious, and some would say incautious nature, my first impulse was to find out what the contents of the beaker was. So I did what any budding Pasteur or Nobel would have done. I took the glass plate, which served as a lid fore the beaker, off and took a good long sniff.

Unfortunately the contents of the glass jar turned out to be chlorine gas whose creation, for reasons known only to the teacher and the board of education, was a required part of the curriculum. For those of you who are unfamiliar with chlorine gas, it’s one of those things that our German friends decided to use during the War to End All Wars. What it does is incapacitate anyone who gets a whiff and leaves them gasping for fresh air. I can attest that it works just fine.

In my case, each time I attempted to draw in a breath I coughed out what little air my lungs possessed. Following some sort of primeval instinct and a search for clean air, I stumbled outside the building into the parking lot still wheezing and coughing. Luckily the school janitor, who found me kneeling over the curb hacking away, was a veteran of the First War. Once apprised of the situation he gave me a bottle of ginger ale and told me to drink it down. For whatever reason it worked. Up came most of the gas and all of my lunch. The only lingering effect was, strangely enough, a green tinge to my fingernails and the roots of my hair.

There have been other encounters with a shortness of breath including time spent in my great uncle’s family privy which lacked, as many of you I am sure know, not only adequate air flow but anything resembling a Glade air freshening stick.

One summer job sticks out in my memory as well. I was fortunate enough to obtain a job in an oil refinery, through nepotism alone since my uncle and godfather was the firm’s president. This did not save me, however, from regularly being dropped into one of those black oil cars that transport petroleum along our rail system. There was no light, no air and no respiratory masks, just a bucket of turpolene – a mixture of turpentine and kerosene – and a handful of rags, with which I was to clean the inside of the tank, and a lookout who watched to ensure I didn’t pass out from the fumes.

Which brings me to the bronchial problems that have plagued me for the past four days. Whether it’s merely the flu, rampaging pneumonia or a case of the galloping wheezes, I can’t seem, once again, to catch my breath. Oh well, it’s nothing, I am sure, that can’t be solved by antibiotics, a steamer, six hot toddies or a mustard plaster. Hopefully all before my bride follows up on her threat to place a pillow over my face.