Living with Bronchitis

It has been three days, and hence an unusually long time for my current bout of bronchitis to last. Yes, the CWG did have a legacy - a legacy of extremely high SPM count. For me, it is a sense of deja vu. It is now decade since I was diagonised with bronchitis, and in between I went to Visakhapatnam for two years (where the air quality was far superior), and came back to a CNG-enabled Delhi that I grew to love. But now, with the SPM count on an upward trend again, life has truly come a full circle in a decade.

Living with bronchitis has surely been one of the highlights of my last decade. The most severe bout was, of course, back in 2003 when I came back to Delhi from Visakhapatnam and when, in the midst of a SARS scare, I had a severe bronchitis-and-fever round that lasted over a week and infected everybody around me. There were also the two incidents when because of the two jerks to the spine, I couldn't breathe. The first was scary, I felt I was going to die, and the second seemed rather routine. Yet, like every thing that tests you, living with bronchitis teaches me a lot too.

For one, it teaches me the power of hope. Hope not in terms of things improving, but in terms of things and bad phases passing. Often in life, we're depressed and we don't think things can improve. In this situation, i am always reminded that I have to life with bronchitis and other respiratory ailments for the rest of my life, but that they'll come infrequently and hence, that bad times come infrequently too. Bronchitis attacks are the aberrations, good health the regime. Similarly, sad times are (and should be) aberrations, and good times the regime.

Bronchitis has also taught me not to give up. Several times during a bronchitis attack, I lose the energy to persevere to breathe, but I know I can't. Every time that my body asks me to rest while trying to continue with breathing, I have to get my act together and try once more to carry on the divine rhythmic act of breathing. No questions asked, you just continue. Similarly, in life several times there is a temptation to quit, but there has to be the strength and stamina to carry on.

Would I like to be cured of bronchitis? For sure. Do I regret getting bronchitis? I don't know. Every dark cloud truely has a silver lining. Bronchitis has taught me discipline (waking up at 5-6 in the morning doing Baba Ramdev's asanas is not fun) that has helped me achieve so much more in life. It has taught me the importance of health, which though I won't claim to have completely attended to, I have not ignored. Most importantly, bronchitis has made me accept loneliness as a state of being - because at the end of the day, it is I who has to drive myself to take the next breath in. That day, that moment, I am alone.