Asthma, A Short History

Connor Harrison

source: Mikael Häggström

The first records of asthma come to us from Ancient Egypt, which is the asthmatic’s hell: cooking under a Saharan sun on a bed of sand, a slave perhaps, hauling stone the size of a house, undiagnosed, feeling like he is being hanged from the inside, suffocating on nothing but the sky. Asthma is a kind of alchemy, making the air as hot and heavy as a fume, converting it to second-hand smoke. The sound of asthma is the sound of bedbound death, Dickensian London smog death, the dregs of a worn motor. I think of my lungs down there in the dark, unable to see themselves, believing they are something other; believing they are a plant, stretching its pink stems up for sun, falling into panic when I close my mouth. But the lungs aren’t to blame, not personally. They can’t help that the airway contracts like a finger trap, but the lung is the symbol of breath and of life, and so it is blamed for this failure. Once, when I was twelve, they nearly succeeded in killing me, those twin alien purses, fastening their strings. Most times, when I spray my inhaler, they relax, like cats in the sun. And then sometimes they don’t.

Connor Harrison is a writer based in the West Midlands, UK. His work has appeared at Lit Hub, Anthropocene Poetry, New Critique, and Longleaf Review, among others. He is an Editor at Tiny Molecules.