Settling In

Asthma, Fear and the Elderberry’s Empty Stems

Just last week I was at my asthma/allergy doc. We were talking about how it’s been months since I’ve had an upper respiratory infection. I’ve never had a cold. It always travels into my lungs and settles in.

Then, I kid you not, within two days I could feel the pressure building in my sinuses, the headache, the stuffiness, all of it. By day three it had moved to my lungs. I can never stave it off, but I try: water, rest, saline rinse. I call my allergist’s office and answer a series of questions I’ve been answering since I was fourteen, because yes, this has been my doctor’s office that long. The nurse calls in a script for Augmentin. Within a few days I’ll breathe again, and all the gunk the inflammation has made will start moving up and out. My dad taught me how to cough “productively.”

My first asthma attack. Three years old. I remember it was night, my dad carrying me into my grandfather’s ENT office. The overhead fluorescent lights guided us like runway lights toward Pa’s office. I can still smell the Brotherhood Office Building at 5th and State. Too young to swallow pills, Pa crushed the prednisone into water and I took it from a spoon. The bitter taste of prednisone — if you know, you know.

a cast of the lungs’ circulatory system

I never grew out of asthma, like so many promised me. I carry a lot of anxiety about getting sick, anxiety that can border on irrational. But there’s muscle memory feeding that fear, and it’s not unreasonable. I remember the pre-vaccine days of COVID. I had a medical exemption to work from home. My boss wanted everyone in the office anyway, and denied it. I was back for a week when I caught COVID. I drove myself to the hospital, my oxygen in the low 80’s. They kept me a week. I wasn’t intubated, but it was eerie having the nurses come in full PPE: white jumpsuits, so many layers between us. My lungs are weaker; when I get sick, I get sick fast and hard. The anxiety is rooted in experience. I just hate how it takes me over. How it limits me.

The turn from summer to autumn is often when I’m most vulnerable, lung-wise. Ragweed and the rest of what’s blooming make the shift harder every year. I start limiting my time outside, which coincides with my annual abandonment of the garden to fend for itself.

It’s around this time my elderberry bushes, Sambucus canadensis, ripen. I watch the hard green berries turn a purple so deep it’s almost black. As they grow heavy, I know the crisp air isn’t far behind. Then, as always seems to happen overnight, the bushes go from heavy with fruit to bare. Only empty fuchsia stems remain. Fleshy tatting. Intricate elderberry lace, evidence of what was. The via negativa of the elderberry: knowing the berry through its absence.

Right now, wrestling for a few moments of unobstructed breathing, I notice how the empty red pedicels resemble the lungs’ circulatory system. I find myself envious of the elder’s unobstructed flow from season to season: growing, ripening, releasing. Whereas I can’t complete a full breath cycle. My breathing, although better, remains short, tight, congested.