What's wrong with my lungs?

Normal lung vs Asthmatic lung

Hello everybody.

As some of you may already know. I have been constantly battling ongoing uncontrolled asthma symptoms since November 2020 when I suffered heavy influenza which lead to a chest infection. Although I didn't need to go to the hospital, the effects of the influenza that I had at the time still partly remains present in my body and especially my lungs.

 As I write this blog, I am still suffering form a tight chest, nasal congestion and a lot of fatigue.                 There are many places that I used to go to that I simply do no go now because of  my limited breathing.  My physical and mental co-ordination has been reduced. My day-to-day energy has dropped to an all time low. Although I am still able to live independently, what I can do on a daily basis has been reduced. 

The symptoms that I have suffered in the last two and a half years have been tight chest, coughing, sneezing, wheezing, shortness of breath, sweating and fatigue. So what has been going on with me all this time? 

On Thursday 4th May 2023, I had an appointment at my local hospital to learn about the results of the lung function test that I did on Wednesday 22nd March 2023. Did they find anything? Sort of. What they found was that there is a 'fixed swelling' in my airways which is limiting what comes in and out of the lungs. Therefore, I now know where in the lungs that I am having the problem, the very top of them. I have made a return to the gym recently and I realised when doing one of my workouts how sensitive the top of my chest, just below my neck was starting to become. Therefore, I can confirm that these findings are true. 

My medication has seen many changes within the last year, however, so far, none of them have significantly improved my condition. However, I am expecting to receive a new inhaler that is especially designed to open my airways so that more air can get in my lungs. I have guarded hope that this inhaler will be the begining of the end of this long and difficult time in my life and allow me to do more in life.

I have been told many remedies for cold and flu symptoms over the years. For me, only two have really had an immediate effect on my cold and flu symptoms; Vapor-rub and Olbus oil. I've realised that the only other thing that I can do when I am struck by cold or flu is to be patient with it. Unfortunately I seem to catch colds more than the average person and they also last longer. Many have lasted at least a month. Why is all this important? Quite simply, it's the biggest single cause of my asthma.

I cannot wait to go out to the places that I normally visited before this asthma crisis started and go out to eat, socialize and explore. However, at the moment, I cannot go to far outside my home without losing my breath.

Finally, I want to thank my family, especially for their support and understanding during this difficult time, the doctors and nurses who have been understanding and professional with me at all times and the language partners via social media that I have had who have kept me going not just in my language learning journey but also given me some people to talk too during this difficult time. I am hoping that it is not too long before I can be well enough to go outside and enjoy the places that I used to go (and many more too!) 

Richard Davis

 MY PLANS FOR 2023

1). Start an EFL course

Ever since I started teaching English to Brazilians living in England, thanks to my bosses' initiative to make an advert in a magazine, I have been thinking about how I can get an EFL teaching qualification. In late 2020, I found an online course which, if all is successful, will give me a qualification to teach online and even abroad. 

However, due to the pandemic and an influenza infection that has lead to over 2 years of uncontrolled asthma and restricted lung capacity, I have had to delay the start of this my course until I have felt well and strong enough to start something new. 

Once I have passed the course, I can look forward to teaching people from around the world through my laptop. 

2). Return to over-the-board chess

Another thing that has been delayed because of my health issues is my return to over-the-board chess after announcing that I am coming out of retirement on 5 August 2021. My reason for leaving real-life tournament chess was the fact that I thought that I would start a new career as an EFL teacher for certain. However, there were times last year where I thought about quitting my EFL career due to the stress of working with other people in a foreign language of which I had some unsuccessful relationships with. Since that time though, I have received compliments form some of my students who thanked me for my efforts in helping them with their English ,which have inspired me to take on the profession.

3). Keep going to the gym

One of my biggest struggles of my life is finding a gym that is suitable for my auditory sensory needs and is easily locatable. During the spring and summer of 2022, I had put on a lot of weight due to inactivity because of my uncontrolled asthma and having too many sweet foods. The doctors advised me to got the gym in order to try to lose some other the excess weight as this will help ease some of the symptoms.

Thankfully, I was in luck! In October 2202, I found a new gym located around the corner from my food shop; but what was even better was that it was very affordable and the music inside the gym was of a reasonable volume that did not offend my sensory processing.

My new gym has been a real blessing for me and I intend to go there as frequently as possible.  

4). Get back into meditation and yoga.

One thing that I was doing regularly prior to my volunteer work in 2019 was meditation and yoga. I first discovered meditation in December 2009 when I discovered a book on Amazon called 'The quiet' by Paul Wilson which spoke about the benefits of meditation and gave some basic but really life transforming practices for the readers to try for themselves. 

Since then, I have visited Buddhist centres to have meditation classes where I can talk to other people about their meditation experiences after the class. 

I first started to do regular yoga in the late summer of 2017 when I saw a flyer about Friday night yoga classes in a Hindu temple. The classes would normally last 2 hours and were free for everyone, although donations were encouraged. 

I've recently gone back into doing yoga at home. However, because of my uncontrolled asthma at the moment, I am only doing standing asanas in order to reduce the stress on my lungs.

5). Keep learning languages

One of the joys that I have had in my life over the years is learning foreign languages. From the days of learning French at school form the age of 10, to now being a daily language learner from the comfort of my own home. Learning languages means leaning about new groups of people and new cultures. It has also given me a higher level of confidence speaking to other people.

I have been learning Portuguese since encountering my Brazilian managers in my old volunteering job in 2019 and I have not looked back since. I am still using various materials to improve my Portuguese and I have now helped many Brazilians with their English as part of language exchange. I now have online Portuguese classes to make sure that I am making progress in the language.

I started 2022 by launching a life blog in Portuguese where I share various life and cultural experiences in the Portuguese language.  https://vidaricharddavis.blogspot.com/

I hope to take online classes in other languages too like Spanish and French so that I can improve my comprehension of those languages too.

My asthma: 2 years on.

It has now been about 2 years since I had that severe influenza infection that has given me so many difficulties in the last 2 years. Throughout this time, my life has been dictated by a tight chest and heavy coughing, sneezing, wheezing, and sweating. There has been times where I have feared for my own survival. 

Thankfully, there is light at the end of the tunnel and my asthma is starting to be better controlled which is allowing me to move around better and even be able to workout at a gym.

However, I still have periods of coughing and sneezing occasionally which triggers my already tight chest which still slows my body down making me unable to move around sufficiently.

I'm slowly getting closer to getting my normal life back. However, with my tight chest, and a peak flow that has dropped to an average of only about 350, I still have to be careful with my own body and take medication as prescribed.

I am still hoping that one day I will get over this difficult period and go back to doing all of the things that I love doing without the physical restrictions of my asthma.

MY NEW BED

My old bed

 My new bed

Out with the old, in with the new! On the 5th of July, I received a new base for my bed after 13 years of sleeping on my old one. 

Thanks Mum! 😊❤️

Thank you Mum.

THANK YOU MUM 

Since November 2020 I have been going through personal health problems which have affected my breathing and therefore has limited what I have been able to do during this time but one person who has been of great service to me in this difficult period, especially during the pandemic is my mother. 

She has provided me with so many useful things during this time of which without, my life would have been more difficult.

Thank you Mum and I will forever grateful for all of the good things that you have done for me throughout my life.

 INDEPENDENT! ... not single.

One of the most burning questions in my life is How to be happy single. Conventional wisdom over the generations have always said that the key to a happy life is to get married and start a family. Societies throughout the generations have followed this philosophy almost without question. That is... until now. So we now have to ask ourselves the question are married people really happier? I have read articles on the internet giving conflicting conclusions about whether or not happiness really has anything to do with someone's marital status.

Ultimately, I have decided that it really depends on your outlook of life and what your life goals are. There are some who want to be married and start a family while others just want a successful career out of their biggest passion in life. It can also depend somewhat on your character. Some work better in groups while others prefer to work alone. Some gain energy with other people around them while others lose it. Some are happy having lots of friends in life while others prefer just to have that one really good companion.

One thing about life on this day in 2016 is that it is not the relationship itself that makes you happy, but rather the thoughts behind of the relationship. That is the thought (and not necessarily the reality) that there is somebody out there that can make you happy for the rest of your life. However, for most of us, this will prove to be only a pipe dream and with marriage rates going down and divorce rates going up virtually across the board, maybe we need to re-think what it actually means to be happy in life. 

Can we be happy on our own? Of course we can. There are many ways of making ourselves happy in our own solitude from doing our favourite hobbies, to eating our favourite food to having a walk in the park to listening to our favourite music. Ultimately, we can create our own happiness be being free of the thoughts that make us unhappy. Basically, happiness is simply the lack of unhappiness.

Perhaps the most prominent reason that people feel the need to find a romantic partner (or even just a friend in some cases) is loneliness. Loneliness is a topic that I have covered in detail in the past on this blog site. However, it has to be said that I think loneliness to this day is still a relatively misunderstood thing. Many people believe that loneliness is simply being on their onw when in fact, loneliness is the feeling that we have when we are on our own. It is the shame and guilt that we feel when we our on our own because we often put ourselves under pressure to to have friends and be friends with other people. Loneliness is also the feeling of dependency of other people making them happy in some way; and that takes me nicely to the crux of this post.

When we think of ourselves as 'single' in the context of intimate relationships, we often think of our lives in terms of  lack; who or even what we are lacking in our lives. There is always an aura of negativity when we have to refere to us as single, which is basically saying that we are lacking someone in our lives. This leaves a metaphoric hole in our hearts where we don't even feel like a complete person. Notice that when we say that we are looking for our other half, we are essentially calling ourselves a half! Do we really want to live the rest our our lives as 'a half'? What a terrible thought! Do we really want to be 'half' people living 'half' lives? This is the whole point of this post. We want to be whole!..not half.  Who on earth wants to be a half person living a half life. Life is meant to be lived to the full, not half. We want to a WHOLE...not a hole! (Yes, the English language does strange things like this. Two words that sounds the same but are spelt slightly differently with different meanings. It's amazing between feeling complete and incomplete can be just one letter. (or two))

So, how do we we become happy single? Well... the answer is kind of the title of this blog post.

STOP THINKING ABOUT YOURSELF AS SINGLE AND START THINKING OF YOURSELF AS ... ... INDEPENDENT!

Doesn't that feel better? Notice how the word independent makes you feel less ... well ... dependent. However, this is not to say that you will never depend on anyone or anything doing certain things to get a desired result (we all need help from other people sometimes) but it will make you feel a lot stronger emotionally and help you focus on the bigger picture in life that is the picture of your own happiness. Yes that's right! You own happiness that you gained ... on your own. As Thich Naht Hanh once said, "Happiness is available, please help yourselves." 

Ultimately, we create our own happiness. which doesn't require other people to give it to us. We can still look for our partners and friends but now we can do it with without the perception that we need them in order to make us happy. Once we realise that we can get our own happiness in life, We are free!

NOW GO OUT THERE AND ENJOY YOUR INDEPENDENCE!

 MY REVIEW OF 2021

HEALTH

As I write this document, I am  currently going through one of the worst health spells of my life. For a little over a year now, I have experienced some of he worst asthma of my life. The symptoms were first present in mid- November 2020 after suffering flu symptoms. The asthma has become so debilitating that I have felt very restricted in my everyday activities. There are day where I can barely walk without sweating an feeling breathless. It has lead to me seeing my GP on numerous occasions about my strong and ongoing asthma symptoms. There is now speculations that it can be more than asthma going on in my lungs. Lung conditions including Bronchitis have been thought of to why I continuously have breathing problems throughout the day. We wont know until March 2022 earliest as that is when my spirometry test is due to happen. Until then, I just have to do my best to survive in these trying times.

FAMILY

Family life has been very difficult for me this year with various misunderstandings about certain things the I posted on my personal Facebook account over the reasons for me being unable to find a romantic partner. To this day, I still do not understand why my mother and family  are so upset about me posting my thoughts about why I cannot get a girlfriend.  I can only think that family pride is to blame for this perception.

On 13th of July, I published a blog about what I would like to see more of in my family, which I later posted a link of in my personal Facebook account. The blog was simply about how my family can better support me. This lead to not only a fallout with my mother but also a fallout with my younger sister. My sister thought that I cared about Facebook more than I did about my family but this was simply a misperception of the situation. I actually wrote that blog because I actually do care about my family and I wanted to help them help me in a better way. My sister never understood this and eventually pushed my away saying: "If you don care, than I don't care 

Thankfully, after a handful of conversations, my mother and I have come to an agreement on certain thing like how to get a date and the things that my mother can an cannot do for me.

Throughout my whole life, I have always struggled to have the confidence to talk to my family directly as I have found myself in too many painful fallouts which have preciously lead to a shutdowns in communication and even fights.

Thanks to the help and support that I have received from over-the-phone counselling, I have gained a lot more confidence in verbal communication than I have had previously. That leads me nicely to my next topic.

COUNCELLING

Between early October and mid November, I was given 6 weekly counselling sessions from the counselling organisation Care to Listen. My counsellor was a woman who explained her perspectives of my situation with my family and ill feelings of not being able to find a romantic partner. One concept that she brought consistently was communication. The things that she said about communication was (at least in my eye) ground-breaking. For most of my life, I have always been very structured in my communicating, whether it was face-to-face, over the phone, in writing of even on social media.

The things that my counsellor taught me about communication were as follows:

1). Communication is a trial and error process. 

There isn't always a right of wrong way to communicate to a person. Sometimes you just have to try different things to get the desired result. Different people send and receive different types of communication differently and you simply have to adapt to the person you are talking to depending on his/her way of interprating language.

2). It's OK to ask a woman out. 

This may sound rather obvious to a lot of my readers but before my counselling sessions, I did not believe that is was a good idea to directly ask a woman out. I thought that it would sound cringeworthy to women if a man was so open about his intimate feelings to a woman. I thought that women would simply freak out if I said anything like "Can I have your number please" to them. However, I have been assured that this way of communicating your desire of someone is completely normal and that it is possible for me to say something like this to a woman that I have deep feelings for.

3). You can only control 50% of any relationship.

No matter how good your intentions are, there are always going to be relationships out there that simply will not work. AT the end of the day, you can only do your half of the relationship. If the other half of the relationship is not going to co-oprerate with you, there nothing you can really do about it. Don't take it personally. You just have forget about the person, wish him/her good luck and move on.

4). It's OK to talk to strangers.

When I was growing up, I was told not to talk to strangers. However, one thing that my counsellor told me is that many relationships start with people that are at first unknown to you. One thing that I need to learn is to talk to strangers. Perhaps I can start by saying hello to someone who works a corner shop or a supermarket. I think this will be a good starting point.

5). Stay confident

One beautiful thing that my counsellor pointed out to me is that I am actually a better communicator that I think. I think my lack of confidence over the years is due to the theory that people on the autism spectrum typically struggle with verbal communication. Therefore, when I find myself in a fallout with someone, I often credit this theory and and start despairing at what I have lost. My counsellor however told me that with time. I will eventually find better people to talk to if I stay at it and keep going. There will always be someone good out there to talk to.

CHESS

In what is my first full calendar year without any over-the-board competition since joining South Norwood Chess Club, I think I have achieved various notable things on the playing site lichess.org.

First, I was a regular competitor in the Coulsdon Chess Fellowship (CCF) 10 minute-a-side rapid-play swiss tournaments on the site which was played on Mondays and Fridays until June. I won 3 of those tournaments within this calendar year a few others from the previous year. However, what was even more pleasing was the fact that I have won 2 of the ChessNetwork 10-minute-a-side Rapid-play tournaments that since the pandemic have happened every Saturday afternoon.  It has also been year in which I have reached new peak rapid and blitz ratings.

On the 5th of August this year, literally 365 days after I had announced my retirement for over-the-board chess, I decided to reverse my decision and plan to play over-the-board chess in the future. However, as of yet, I have not been able to resume over-the -board activity due to the health reasons I mentioned above.

LANGUAGE LEARNING

One interesting ambitions that I had a the start of the year is to start (or restart) learning languages other that Brazilian Portuguese which I have been learning for 2 and a half years. I actually made a weekly schedule at the start of the years about the languages that I would learn. Unfortunately, my problems with my lungs started to take its toll and and in the end, I simply didn't have he energy to learn languages every day. I have however been able to successfully find a good Portuguese teacher who currently lives in Brazil and has given me good lessons via Skype and Zoom for a reasonable fee. 

I feel confident enough in my Portuguese to have confidence speaking the language to native speakers. However. This is not to say that I don't make mistakes nor do I not have moments where I have to look for words to complete a sentence. It just means that I have learnt the language long and well enough to make my own sentences and and keep conversation going within the language. I do however still go through all of the challenges that many language learners go through with pronunciation, grammar, vocabulary and even listening to somebody talk a speed. (Mind you, I find it hard to understand a rambler even in English.) The keys to leaning any language is patience, persistence, regular study, practice and having fun.

FUTURE

One thing that I plan to do when my lung health improves is to enroll in a course to become a qualified online English teacher which will give me access to teach English to anyone around the world. With of my experience working with the Brazilian community and helping them with their English, I think I am ready to take that the extra mile and make an official career out off what I am currently doing. It's just a matter of fixing my lungs and getting and appointment with the job centre.

I also want to do a course on accounting as I am currently elected as a trainee treasurer for the West Thornton Community Association (WTCA) and therefore could do with some training in certain fields of the subject. I actually did do a course on accounting in my final year of college but that was 16 years ago and I am sure that things have changed in the accounting world significantly in that time. Also, I think my interest in accounting will be a lot greater than it is in 2005 as back then, I was still in the process of learning about the adult world as well as the fact that back then, I was still trying to work out certain things in my personal life. I look forward to one day taking over as the treasurer of the WTCA when certain things settle down and the current treasurer is ready to step down from his duties.

I have accumulated a good number of Spanish speaking friends on Facebook, so I think that Spanish will be a good language for me to learn next year as well as continuing my Portuguese studies.

Finally I hope to be well enough to play over-the board chess again after announcing that I have come out of retirement. Since the start of the pandemic I have only been playing in online tournaments.  I look forward to one day seeing my old friends one day (and making new ones)  at South Norwood and CCF and showing everyone what I can do in real life games and tournaments.

The End.

Compleated Saturday 18 December 2021