Asthma is life threatening for many of us in severe category – teacher Rachel
NEXT week, May 1 to May 8, is Asthma Awareness week in Ireland – and a young Sligo teacher wants to use it to educate people that not all asthma is the same.
Ballymote native Rachel Murray, who now lives in Ballintogher, told the Sligo Weekender: “I have severe asthma and asthma is an illness often disregarded or played down in Irish society because, in my experience, it is seen as common.
“Asthma as a disease has the fourth highest prevalence in the world in Ireland, so many people have been issued an inhaler for intermittent or mild asthma by a GP. As a result, many people think all asthma is the same. “Severe asthma is not the same. It is far from that. It’s an illness I suffer with every day and is life threatening for many of us in the severe category.” She said she wanted to highlight what severe asthma is and to make society more aware of “how an inhaler does not fix us and we live daily with symptoms”.
Rachel said that there is “a common misconception in Ireland is that asthma is just asthma” but she said there are several levels.
Rachel said: “I feel as a person very belittled in society and often I’m not taken seriously but people with severe asthma are high risk.”
She said that around 6,300 people have it in Ireland and according to the HSE and the Asthma Society one person in Ireland dies each day as a result of asthma.
Covid has added to her concerns on that score and she told the Irish Daily
Mail last month that Covid could be “a death sentence” for her.
Rachel recently got her first dose of the AstraZeneca vaccine but it will probably be June before she gets her second jab and she is unsure how effective it will be in her case.
She said: “I think it is brilliant that we have got to this stage but there is so much unknown about it yet. There is no concrete evidence that I will be okay so there is still that element of worry for me because of the state of my lungs.”
She is a teacher at a school in Donegal town but hasn’t been back at the school since March last year because of Covid and is teaching English and history online to pupils who have also been unable to return to school because of underlying conditions. She has also been very much restricting her contacts and movements because of Covid.
Rachel said that intially her asthma was very mild.
She said: “I had asthma attacks and quite a lot of chest infections. I was diagnosed as a teenager and always suffered with my chest. I had open heart surgery as a child as well but it never was a major problem as such and I had it under control.”
But she said that at 21 she ended up developing severe pneumonia and that caused a lot of problems for her. Rachel said: “In the last three to four years things have just gotten worse and it has got more serious for me. It doesn’t get better with the usual medicines.
“I was on four inhalers a day, a daily nebuliser which I may have to use twice a day or more and I would be on long-term oral steroids which have a plethora of side effects which nobody wants and also other medications to try to keep my airways open.
“Every day was quite tiring. Normally I have a wheeze but thankfully that hasn’t been so bad because of a new medication.
“I got a lot of tightness in my upper back and in my upper lungs, and pain every day from inflamation.” Because of the damage to her lungs she has to do exercises every day to clear muccus from them so that she doesn’t get an infection – but she still gets quite a lot of infections.
“It’s quite a tiring cycle that you are constantly trying to stay on top of,” she said.
She said that growing up so many people were diagnosed inhalers, possibly as a result of a chest infection, that but she said “that isn’t the same type of asthma that I have now and that is why I am trying to get people to undertand how serious it is for me. “People don’t understand because they see it as just asthma and don’t realise the impact it has on my daily life.”
Rachel recently celebrated her 29th birthday but is unable to always do the things that most people of her age would do.
“There are normal events like birthdays, dinners, nights out that I can’t attend,” she said.
“Sometimes I am not able to keep up with family and friends and that is very hard to accept.
“I have had days where I wouldn’t have had a good night’s sleep and the fatigue will hit me like a ton of bricks the next day and even something as simple as a walk would be a massive no for me.
“I might not be able to go to family events because my body doesn’t coperate every day.
“These are the things that I want people to become more aware of. I have had numerous people say to me, I have asthma. It’s not that I am trying to belittle anyone who has asthma but I want people to become more understanding of the language around it.” Rachel has an Instagram page called I_wheeze_alot.
She said: “It is a diary for me and I have found it’s absolutely brilliant that other people have been able to reach out to me who are on similar medications or in similar situations or have family members that might be in that type of cycle that I am in.
“It is just to reach out and have a community and get support because the majority of people don’t realise how life changing this is for people.” Rachel is also promoting the Love Your Lungs challenge fundraiser which the Asthma Society is doing next week as part of Asthma Awareness Week.
Participants are asked to register at njuko.net/love-your-lungs-virtualwalk for the entry fee of €15. Then, during Asthma Awareness Week, they sync their Fitbit or log their steps on the iDonate step tracker to collectively reach the target of 10 million steps.
“Many people think all asthma is the same. But severe asthma is not the same – it is far from that. I suffer with it every day”