Surviving bad lung days

I'm a bit late with the blog this week. Usually I write in the morning, but today I had things to do, and now it's the afternoon. I'm sleepy because I just spent three hours in the sun -- or, rather, in the grey haze which passed for sun at the beach earlier today. I went to a barbecue put on by Narcotics Anonymous, having decided this morning that it might be fun. And so it was. I wore my pretty floral sundress from Anthropologie with my new cowboy boots and felt very festive and summery, carrying my Japanese parasol to protect my pallor from the sneakiness of the sun. An overcast day is always the worst day for sunburn because it doesn't feel hot, so you can't tell you're fried until it's too late. The sun made an appearance about twenty minutes before I left, but the whole thing was pretty much over by then.

And now here I am. I had two bad lung days this week, and I've come to see that quitting smoking had absolutely nothing to do with the improvement in my breathing in recent weeks. What did the trick was the weather. We had a couple of weeks of dry sunshine, and my lungs cleared right up, but then the fog rolled in on Thursday morning and I had two days of severe breathlessness and anxiety. It's better now because the marine layer isn't as thick and has burned off earlier in the day, but it sure would be nice if we could have a summer. Every year we have "June Gloom," a month of grey and overcast days which generally clear up by the Fourth of July. This year we've had "May, June and July Gloom," with a day or two of sunshine here and there, or even a week or two upon occasion. It's now August. It's time for us to have a month or two of that famous California sunshine. If I have to make it through the rainy season this winter dealing with breathlessness and anxiety, I'd really like to have a few months of dry weather and good breathing beforehand. Not that we've had much rain in the last few years, but the drought has to end at some point.

I talked to Judy about it on Friday, saying I don't know if I'm going to make it if I have to deal with that much breathlessness on a weekly basis, and she suggested that I try drinking peppermint tea in the morning. Ick. I like peppermint tea, but not in the morning. I like coffee in the morning. Well, decaf, anyway. I love coffee. Some nights I lie in bed before I fall asleep and think happily about the coffee I'm going to drink when I wake up. I'm drinking coffee right now, in fact. For some reason I always crave coffee after a daytime party, so I came home and made a pot, which I'm sipping now as I write. So probably I won't be drinking peppermint tea in the morning. I'll buy some and try it and if it does wonders, I may change my mind, but I suspect that it won't have enough of an effect to make the taste of peppermint acceptable in the morning. Judy seems to think that an inhaler is too drastic a solution, which puzzles me. People get inhalers when they have a little cough. What's so drastic about them? I've never used one because I've never had any problems with my lungs. I've never had asthma or bronchitis, and I can't remember the last time I had a cough. I don't understand why getting an inhaler would be such a big deal, especially since I would only need it occasionally, but maybe Judy knows something I don't.

I was surprised by how easy it was not to smoke at the barbecue today. I was a bit concerned about it because it was the first time since I quit that I would be faced with smokers en masse, and I didn't know how I would react. I didn't react at all. I hardly even noticed the cigarettes. I don't think it would be a good idea to spend a lot of time around smokers, but I'm glad to know that I can go to an NA function and not mind the smoking. None of my friends smokes anymore, and for a long time I felt like a bit of a pariah because I was the last smoker in my social circle, but now I'm grateful that I don't have to be faced with other people's cigarettes very often. Much as I would like to think I'm immune to it, other people's behavior influences me. When I spend time with smokers, I want to smoke. That's why I don't spend time with people who use drugs.

Okay, it's time to get busy writing on step six. I did my fifth step with my sponsor nearly three weeks ago, and I only began writing on step six last weekend. I needed to take a break in between to process steps four and five, but now I want to get moving with steps six and seven. These are my favorite steps because these are when the rewards start coming, when all of that brutal self-examination and self-appraisal pays off. I want to be relieved of the defects of character which are standing between me and other human beings, and my fourth step gave me a pretty clear picture of where the problems lie. Now it's just a matter of becoming entirely ready to have my higher power remove those defects of character, and of humbly asking to have my shortcomings removed. One thing at a time, though, and what I'm doing now is writing in detail about the defects.

And here's to another week's passing. Only 35 to go.