Asthma cut short the life of my mother and has sickened each of my two children at various points in their lives. During one relatively brief episode of my life I fell ill from it too, some years back. I’m better now but am left with the dread that asthma can always recur, upending the life of my family, sending us running to middle of the night visits to the emergency room or causing my kids to miss yet another day of school.
At the time she began to fall ill more frequently, I was around 10. But even at that tender age, I quickly came to understand that asthma medications in the United States were prohibitively expensive. The high price tag meant that the medication my mother desperately needed was sometimes out of reach. After losing someone so close to me to asthma, I have become intimately familiar with the signs of the illness.