Yeah, I was in my last year of primary school, and I just remember really being out of breath quite a lot at PE and my mum brought me to the doctor, and they tested me or, you know, checked me, my peak flow, and then was just diagnosed then. So it was around, I suppose, September 1998 before I started secondary school, just.

So you were about eleven.

Yeah.

And how did you feel when you were told?

I wasn’t really too sure what asthma was. I just knew I couldn’t breathe properly [laughs]. That was really it until it was just when I got older, and went in the secondary school and more people had it, and I realised, you know, that it was actually quite dangerous but I think then I panicked a bit more but, you know, when I was first diagnosed it didn’t really didn’t really annoy me [laughs].

Okay and were you told at the time what it was?

Yeah, the nurse one of the nurses, you know, explained what it was, but when you’re when you’re young, you know, it was in one ear and out the other, but yeah, she said, the nurse like explained it in quite a lot of detail.

And gave me pictures and a wee DVD or video of what it was, and different children with asthma and…

So was it sort of children talking about asthma and telling you what it was like?

Yeah.

Right.

And it was, you know, it was just showing the different activities where your asthma could affect you. It was showing

Okay.

Say children playing football or like skipping, stuff like that.

Sort of physical exercise and

Yeah.

…activities. Yeah. And was it good to have other children telling you about what it was like?

Yeah, cause, you know, if they’re if they’re a similar age, it’s easier for you to understand than, you know, a nurse telling you but, yeah, it was it was a lot easier for me to like understand and to say, Oh, well, that’s exactly what it is. Instead of just saying, you know, what I’ve been told, actually understanding was, so easier for me.

And so did the children on the video talk about it then?

Yeah, talked they just talked about how often their asthma affects them and if it, you know, other family members had it, just stuff like that.

Yeah. Okay, and so at that time, what, yeah, what kind of things did the nurse tell about what asthma was?

She just said that it was a condition to do with your breathing and she just really said that sometimes if I feel a bit tight in my chest, that’s when I should be taking an inhaler and explained why I was taking my inhaler, you know, and just that was really it.

As a child it was actually quite bad. I mean my Mum was, my Mum said that you were sort of looking at it was almost like a regular thing of asthma attacks. So I remember going to hospital quite a lot, and seeing a specialist there and bits of it in and out of A & E quite a bit. Emergency doctors being called out so up until I was about may be starting primary school it was almost a regular thing.

As I got older obviously it sort of gets better, up until I was about ten, I was quite sort of unsettled, so it was a lot of medication, a lot of trips to the doctors. After I was ten, sort of becoming a teenager things started to improve after that. I noticed the symptoms a lot less. I found it easier to do things like sports, which I struggled to do at primary school for example. Things seemed to be quite settled throughout most of my teens into my twenties and stuff. Then I sorted of noticed things getting a bit bad again after sort of about five or six years ago. I moved from [city] to [city] and I don’t know if it was the amount of pollution in the air or something, but it started becoming quite unsettled in the last couple of years again.

What was it like as a child having asthma? How did it feel for you?

I remember it being sort of annoying. Wheezing all the time. I can just remember always having a cold as well. And I think that’s one of the sort of, you’re prone to these things. So I was always having a cold or being wheezy all the time. Sort of annoying when you can’t run around with your friends and stuff. So sports wasn’t a great thing which a little bit annoying because you sort of got a bit of stick for it when you were at school, you know, you can’t play sorts like the rest of the boys. So you go a bit of, you know, a real boy kind of thing, so that was a bit annoying that way.

How did you deal with that?

I tried for example, I couldn’t play football because I just couldn’t run, running especially as a child used to set my asthma of. It seems to as an adult it’s not such a big problem anymore. I tried finding other sports to do. One of the strangest ones was living in Scotland and not playing football and instead liking cricket, that was like the worst thing you could do [laughs]. So, you know, trying and finding a way round it.

The worst one I’ve had recently is with the primary school. They shed had a puffer, and shed got the puffer that they had in the office, and she kept it in her pocket and shed taken it home. And so they didn’t have one, so she was having an asthma attack. They phoned me up and I was at work last year, she was having an asthmatic attack, and they wouldn’t give her anybody elses puffer, because it was illegal, and so she was having an asthma attack, and I was at work and I had to leave my work in a rush to get over to her school to give her puffer. All the time I knew, every moment’s delay I knew she was there [makes hard to breathe noise] not being able to breathe. It was absolutely horrendous and I just felt so cross that they couldn’t just. They had about ten or fifteen blue puffers in the cupboard, they couldn’t just, you know, give her a sneaky squirt of somebody elses. Oh no, it’s health and safety. I can’t tell you how annoying that is. They would watch somebody suffer in front of them. What if she had started turning blue with it? Given her one?

It’s a pity they can’t have a sort of a spare one, just for, in case anyone loses them or something.

It seemed a bit, I mean you obviously you can’t, I don’t blame the office staff, but at the same time I was furious that there was, there were ten or fifteen of those things there, just there, just sitting there, and if she could have had one it might have made her feel better. But no, can’t give it her, oh no, it’s not hers. So that was awful. And I kind of got the sack from that, because on a supply job, supply teaching, and they basically said don’t come back, because I’d left in a rush.

Do you manage your own medication now?

Yeah now I do. I take care of it. Now I’ve realised my parents don’t even ask if I’ve taken it a lot now because I think they trust me to take it. And it’s just natural now. I just feel I get up and I have to take it. It’s just the natural thing for me to do.

Around what age did you start to manage?

Around fourteen, fifteen I think it was.

Can you tell me about that process of your parents handing it over to you so to speak?

Yeah. Well what, what they’ve done in the past was bring it all out for me and watch me take it and ask me if I’ve got my other pump on me just in case I need it. But since then I’ve, Im taking all my medication up with me. I take it when, when it’s needed and when I have to and they don’t bother me about it now. I can just get on with it and just, and they would just know I’ve done it anyway.

And then, when she was eighteen months old she became asthmatic. She had some episodes where we were in hospital, and from then on my life wasn’t really my own. Because she would get, if she had a cold, or if the weather was really cold, she might get wheezy, and would just be able to do nothing but sit on my knee for days. And just have to go and have medicine and keep a little, but she kept getting wheezy and the doctors were getting quite cross saying, Are you giving her the puffers properly? Are you doing this? But we did have several instances. She was in hospital seven times I think in those years. And it was, I didn’t really get a full time job. I worked from home, and I kept working from home, but couldn’t go back to work because I knew that I wouldn’t be able to keep a job down, because at any minute the nightmare might begin where she would be poorly and I’d spend three days just looking after her, and not being able to think about anything else, let alone other responsibilities.

The medication now is so much better than it was.

I was going to ask you what kind of medication were you prescribed at that time?

Oh, wonderful, I had ephedrine, which is kind of speed, really.

That was glorious because if you took too much, it gave you loads of energy. It didn’t last but it did give you lots of energy. And I had an inhaler which was I can’t remember the name of it now, a big green thing, tasted revolting. But that was quite dangerous and you were able to, you could overdose on that inhaler and give yourself a heart attack. But the modern inhalers, it doesn’t work like that.

The steroid inhalers made a big difference.

I mean the Intal had got, the powder thing, had got a bit of steroid in it. But these are much more sophisticated. I mean the, the huge range of drugs for asthma now is impressive…

so that your doctor can decide that, well, if you’re not managing on this one then well try you on this one, and hes got various things to, to go for.

My memories are of missing quite a lot of education, in the, in the summer term. And of at that stage I was taking Intel inhalers. They were little sort of, I used to call it my filler, you used to have to pierce them and take the medicine through there.

The doctor came sometimes daily, but certainly I do remember being on injections three times a week, and the doctor would come in and administer Obviously telephones were different in those days. I remember my Mum having to leave the house and run to the local phone box to get the doctor, so those types of memories were quite frightening.

It must have been quite tricky having medications and injections and things when you were a child?

Well it stops you being bad about injections as an adult, because they were just so much, you know, a part of what I did. I mean I obviously have the flu jab now because of my asthma and it just doesn’t bother me being injected. I suppose you just think you know, it’s what you have to do.

Can you remember how you actually felt during an attack when you were a kid?

Yes, one really, really strong memory comes to mind. We lived in, just like a normal three bed roomed semi, with a, you know, quite a sort of moderate drive where the car used to be parked. And there was a wall. And I remember being sat on that wall and just not being able to physically get as far as the door. And I just sat on that wall. I mean it felt like hours. It was quite a while I think. But it just felt like hours, and I just literally sat there until my Mum noticed me out the window. And it was just very frightening, just not being able to make that, you know, I just literally went out. I was only walking home from a friends. I just ran out of steam. And just couldn’t get my breath and I couldn’t walk.

It must have been strange as a child to know that you had a condition

A life-threatening

that is life-threatening?

Yeah, because you’re aware that other kids didn’t have that and you were also aware that other kids had it, at different levels. To get to that boarding school you had to be quite acute, you know, chronically ill, it was actually called a School for Delicate Children’ but I’d say 90% of us were asthmatics. Asthma is an absolutely awful condition because we all take breathing for granted until you can’t breathe. To not be able to breathe and actually it can also hurt, it so, [touches microphone] I’m so sorry, it can also be painful for your chest is terrifying, and you just sometimes think, Well, if the next one doesn’t kill me the next one might. The next one after that might. I’m not enjoying life right now. And my mate died in the holidays I really wish this would end because you’re also made aware that theres no cure.

And the amount of times people, especially doctors in, insensitively would say, Oh, you know, most kids grow out of this, you’ll have grown out of this of this by the time you’re, you’re 14 or 15. And I thought, Well, that’s bollocks for a start [laughs] because you knew that, you know, there were kids in the school who were, you know, in there and 16 or 17 sometimes who were still really ill and they hadn’t grown out of it.

From the point that I was ten days old it became apparent to both my family and to the consultants at the hospital that I had numerous conditions but one of them was a lung problem. But obviously 39 years ago asthma wasn’t recognised as it is now and there wasn’t the experience with it. So it wasn’t until I was five that I got official confirmation that was the specific lung condition that I had, which I think gave enormous relief to my parents at the time because they were just floundering in the dark and being treated as hypochondriac parents. Obviously to myself it didn’t make a lot of difference at such a young age because I wasn’t aware of the implications of it and, and the effect it would have on my life. But as the years had gone on I think the impact has become quite apparent throughout school. At primary school it was a case of you couldn’t go outside and join in with PE because any severe physical activity would produce an asthma attack. The school had pets and a lot of the kind of outdoor lessons were sort of centred around the pet. But they set my asthma off so I was always kept separate, which of course lead to being labelled as different as a child. And then that always lead to bullying of course, which continued really throughout my whole childhood because I think back then I was quite rare. Whereas today my friend’s children, they’re in a class of 30 and half the class’ll have asthma. When I was little I was the only one in the whole school so nobody understood it…

Or understood why it kicked in, how it made you feel when it kicked in. Certainly as a teenager I became very conscious of having it because all you want to is fit in as a teenager and I couldn’t. PE lessons were hell.

Especially during winter anything like netball or hockey or cross-country, it was completely out of the question but the understanding wasn’t there, on the whole in the school. So you had to just try and do it and then of course you felt exceedingly ill. Very weak, you were always wheezing, then getting chest infections, because you were outside and with a poor immune system that would always make it worse. And school was hard. It was very hard.

Well I was never diagnosed as a child. I realised that I was breathless doing any kind of sport. I was hopeless at sport at school, but I assumed I was just no good at it. And it wasn’t until I was in my mid 20s, even my late 20s, when I had an Australian girlfriend. I was still living in England at the time. But she was a nurse and she picked it up immediately that this was what I had and bundled me into a doctor’s and had me diagnosed. And after that I was regularly treated for it. Before that I had no idea.

And what, when you were a child. You said that you had certain symptoms and you were feeling breathless when you did sport and that kind of thing. So how did you cope with that?

Well not very well, I was a complete failure at sport and considered that I must just be built that way I suppose. I had a sister who was very much worse affected than I and I think what must have happened is that her case overshadowed mine, and that my parents were so concerned about her that they didn’t actually notice that this was my problem.

Nobody at school picked it up either though which is a bit surprising. I suppose perhaps not so surprising for those days because were talking 50 years ago, but I just thought I was useless at sport.

And what kind of feelings did you have?

Oh tightness in the chest. Any kind of exercise, particularly at certain times of the year. High pollen season and so on I had the usual constriction of breathing in. It was difficult to breath. Every now and then I’d have an actual attack, or what I now recognise as an asthma attack. I think it’s quite astonishing that nobody noticed what it was.

I think my sister had an idea, because she had it herself and I did use her rather dangerous medication once or twice. Which worked, but still nobody seemed to pick it up as a chronic problem for me. And so I just sort of lived with it.