Blog

My name is Brandon Vosika, I’m a 24 year-old artist and painter. I’m currently working on a new project about asthma. I’m making handmade art books called “Shake Well Before Use” which will contain drawings and full color paintings of art about the things that help us breathe. You can currently find my project on kickstarter.com for a very limited time. I’ve had asthma for most of my life so this project is something that’s become extremely important to me.

Here’s my story: 
I’ve had asthma for 22 years of my life. It’s something that is as much a part of me as breathing itself. …

Being that it’s World Asthma Awareness Month, it got me thinking back a bit to some of the progressions in the care and treatment of asthma, and how it enables people to do things they could not do years ago.

I was diagnosed with asthma when I was young from what my mom told me, around 3 years old. I have vague memories of visiting the Children’s Hospital ER for my asthma a couple of times. I remember being rather scared as a kid in the hospital, but also remember that because of my asthma, there were things I missed …

I have a friend who likes to laugh at how complex my life is, she says that normally a person would go to their doctor and say they have breathing difficulties, the doctor would then conduct a few tests and their asthma diagnosis would be handed to them on a plate. Not me, it took me a little over four years to finally secure my diagnosis of asthma.

I guess I should explain a little bit more.

I believe I have had asthma since the Spring of 2008 so since I was 11, almost 12. I remember having hard time …

When a child comes through the door of a Mobile C.A.R.E. Asthma Van for the first time, the appointment will likely take between 45 minutes and an hour. Our healthcare providers are by no means especially slow about their work—they can pack in more than a dozen appointments each during a typical school day—but because asthma management has a number of moving parts, we must be very thorough before forming a management strategy. A failure to consider even one element can undermine all of our other efforts.

Nowhere is thoroughness more necessary than with allergies. If you look at the …

They always say it’s not easy being a teenager. The “image” you give off in your teenage years means everything to you at the time, and everyone just wants to fit in. Yet sometimes, there are obstacles that we face in our teenage years that we refuse to let get in the way of us fitting in because we believe that people will view us differently. One instance that may ring true for many asthmatic patients is the fear that people will either undermine us because we have a physical condition, or view us as strange for using a little …

My name is Allison White, and I have had asthma my whole life. It’s always triggered by a sinus infection, which causes bronchitis and then, there goes my asthma flaring up. I’m used to having problems a couple of times a year. But since November of 2011, I have been on antibiotics and prednisone 7 times and had a 5 day hospitalization in May of this year. My asthma seemed to be getting worse. It was time to step up my doctors and my treatment.

My new pulmonologist quickly figured out I was HIGHLY allergic to several things, especially to …