Exactly! I am sure my anxiety exacerbated it but I know it did not cause it.
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That's one of the really awful things about asthma. No matter what causes it to happen, an asthma attack *causes* anxiety, just by not being able to breathe right, and that's both a good and a bad things; good because anxiety triggers the CNS, which lights up the breathing center in the brain like it's New Years in Times Square (you sure won't be sleeping while there's an asthma attack going on)... bad because anxiety actually causes you to *need* to breathe more, which you can't because you're having an asthma attack! It's a horrible terrifying vicious cycle, and you keep telling yourself, calm down, you're just making it worse... but calming down, when you can't breathe right? Yeah right.
Unless it's summertime and humid, or extremely cold outside, going outdoors can often help; at least psychologically. Sitting backward astride a kitchen chair and leaning forward can help, it relieves pressure on the lungs and the blood supply to the lungs. And yeah, calming down helps a lot, IF you can somehow achieve it. Someone calm and loving gently rubbing your back and shoulders as you lean forward over that chair-back can be very beneficial. Everytime it's happened to me, I think, I need to learn how to meditate... but then I forget about it.It's hard for me to grasp how people survived asthma before there was albuterol and all the other bronchodilators. When you have to deal with crap like this, you sure don't need thick gluey VG in there, crapping things up even worse!
Andria
That's one of the really awful things about asthma. No matter what causes it to happen, an asthma attack *causes* anxiety, just by not being able to breathe right, and that's both a good and a bad things; good because anxiety triggers the CNS, which lights up the breathing center in the brain like it's New Years in Times Square (you sure won't be sleeping while there's an asthma attack going on)... bad because anxiety actually causes you to *need* to breathe more, which you can't because you're having an asthma attack! It's a horrible terrifying vicious cycle, and you keep telling yourself, calm down, you're just making it worse... but calming down, when you can't breathe right? Yeah right.
It's hard for me to grasp how people survived asthma before there was albuterol and all the other bronchodilators. When you have to deal with crap like this, you sure don't need thick gluey VG in there, crapping things up even worse!
Andria
Interestingly enough though, I don't have asthma. I've had 2 different breathing tests this month alone I had scheduled, everything says no asthma, lungs and breathing perfect. But yeah I understand, the same idea, vg was causing me to FEEL as though I couldn't breathe...I know I could, because for my breathing test I stepped outside the office, vaped vg, ran back in to do the test while still having that feeling (I did this on purpose, they knew about it) and they said whatever I was feeling, I was breathing great and lung capacity was 100%, so they said it just feels heavy like I can't breathe even though I can.
But then due to that feeling, I panic, and accidentally hyperventilate, which in turn makes that feeling of not breathing worse. So yeah its a vicious cycle! So technically I can totally breathe on vg fine, just feels like I can't and that's still what I'd call a reaction to me.
Yep -- that hyperventilation due to anxiety, that's very very similar to what an asthma attack feels like -- like there's air going in, but somehow it's just not enough, or it's not reaching where it needs to go -- it's awful!
Andria
Yes it's exactly what vaping vg feels like to me :/ oddly though it takes 1-3 full days of vaping it to fully do that, it doesn't happen immediately (usually) I don't know why the response is delayed. After going back to 70 pg it went away after a couple days. And stays gone as long as I stay at high pg. But again, pg is causing slight issues now too so STILL waiting for my 65/35 and 60/40 to come in to try but oh holidays and shipment delays, blah!
Just stopped by this thread tonight. Read thru it. Switched to sub ohm about a month ago. Not deep sub but .50 or so. Started ordering 70% VG, and I'm experiencing the same effects. Heavy lungs. Breathing being difficult at times. Just feels strange!
Switching back to 50/50 next order. Have both vg and pg here at the house, so mixed some pg into already packaged liquids. killed a bit of flavor, as it diluted already mixed ordered liquids, but I felt better by the next day. Lesson Learned!!!
(Have COPD with 30-35% lung function. So it didn't' take much to notice a change when trying heaver VG).
Thanks Guy's; Knife
Switching back to 50/50 next order. Have both vg and pg here at the house, so mixed some pg into already packaged liquids. killed a bit of flavor, as it diluted already mixed ordered liquids, but I felt better by the next day. Lesson Learned!!!
(Have COPD with 30-35% lung function. So it didn't' take much to notice a change when trying heaver VG).Thanks Guy's; Knife
For me it takes a couple days to get really bad, but I can tell after just one day; always feeling like I need to cough up... but nothing comes up -- which is why I compare it to a hairball, or a dustbunny. The time I tried out 67PG/33VG, it was after about 3 days of that, that I woke with that asthma attack so severe I almost couldn't even inhale from my rescue inhaler; I went back to 80% PG the next day, but it took about a week for that feeling to leave. That was when I tried out 90% PG, but a week of that left my throat and sinuses very burned and painful and my throat bright red. I was thinking, well, CRAP! So I finally settled at 85% PG, which seems to give me the least ill effects of either type. And although at that point I was still mostly buying juice, adding WTA to pre-mades, it was all this that put the last nail in the coffin of buying ejuice; figured with all the needs I have for my ejuice, I'm better off just making my own, so I can customize it at will, on the fly.
I still don't have a cool-mist humidifier/vaporizer, but the weather here has mostly still been mild, only a little use of the furnace so far. Hopefully by the time real winter gets going, I'll have one of those. You might benefit from one of those too, to keep your sinuses moist enough to not feel so irritated.
Andria
Just stopped by this thread tonight. Read thru it. Switched to sub ohm about a month ago. Not deep sub but .50 or so. Started ordering 70% VG, and I'm experiencing the same effects. Heavy lungs. Breathing being difficult at times. Just feels strange!
Switching back to 50/50 next order. Have both vg and pg here at the house, so mixed some pg into already packaged liquids. killed a bit of flavor, as it diluted already mixed ordered liquids, but I felt better by the next day. Lesson Learned!!!
Thanks Guy's; Knife
Same for me, with my asthma -- 67PG/33VG was enough VG to nearly send me to the hospital! Now it's 84%-85% PG all the time, but I still had to add Advair; before I quit smoking, all I needed was the Ventolin.
Andria
Thanks Andria. I'm on Advire 50/500, Spariva, and the rescue inhaler. Started using the RI more often after the switch to more VG and .50 ohm. No doubt it's the VG.
At first I was using the 250/50 Advair, but still having a lot of trouble, so I got the doc to up it to the 500/50... but if I use that at night, it gives me terrible insomnia. I still have one of my 250/50's left, so lately I've been using the 500/50 when I get up, and the 250/50 at night. Seems to be working ok. I'm hoping that maybe by the time I need refills on my prescription, I might be able to get by with just the 250/50; steroids scare the hell out of me, so I'd rather use the least amount I can get away with. Since my WTA percentage is so low now (1%, down from the 10% I started at), my asthma has *slowly* improved; hopefully when I'm done with the WTA completely, the asthma will be much less of a bother -- I started having the REAL trouble with my asthma just a few weeks after I added the WTA, so I do think it has something to do with it. Asthma is kinda different from COPD; with COPD, the problem is mostly structural, but asthma is mostly a chemical thing, and there's often just no telling what chemicals will set it off. Or maybe it's just the gunk factor; the same crap that gunks up my coils and wicks, maybe does the same to my lungs -- I never saw gunk at all till I started using WTA!
Andria
Yes, unfortunately, which is another reason I had to go to total DIY, so I can include enough WTA to be useful, without swamping myself with VG. Because of WTA being 100% VG, back when I was using higher percentages of it, it mostly filled the small amount of VG I want in my recipes; now that I'm down to so little WTA, I use more actual VG, to reach the 15% mark.
Andria
@AndriaD I take it back.
I do have asthma :/ all previous tests showed negative for asthma but I had a 90 min methacholine challenge test today, I almost canceled it since it'd been scheduled before I chaulked up all my problems to vg but I figured eh let's just do it and get it 100% confirmed on paper that I don't have asthma, well by vial 4 I was only breathing at 32% and they had to stop the test. They said "Oh you most certainly have asthma....they just missed it before"
Oh boy.
I do have asthma :/ all previous tests showed negative for asthma but I had a 90 min methacholine challenge test today, I almost canceled it since it'd been scheduled before I chaulked up all my problems to vg but I figured eh let's just do it and get it 100% confirmed on paper that I don't have asthma, well by vial 4 I was only breathing at 32% and they had to stop the test. They said "Oh you most certainly have asthma....they just missed it before"
Oh boy.
I do not think it is surprising that somebody who vapes, especially with high vg, tests negative for asthma sometimes but positive at other times.
It's not like an infection like hiv where you either have it or you don't.
It's more like a condition like for example high blood pressure.
Yes, well, it never happened during a test until they did the big long test that uses medicine to try and purposely induce an asthma attack.
Still weird to me seeing as they said it gave me one, I know it did, but I never had one before like that...this one was unable to exhale without violent coughing fit...first time that ever happened.
Is that the challenge test where you breathe from one inhaler, and if you have asthma, you have an immediate asthma attack, and then they give you a fast-acting bronchodilator to immediately clear it up? And did they do a blood-gas assay? When mine was first diagnosed, they did the blood-gas assay (and they believed me about my need to lie down when I nearly passed out right out of the chair when I saw that bright red arterial blood!), then gave me the inhaler-challenge. That was in 1985 though; I don't know if they need to actually draw arterial blood anymore to determine blood-gas.
Andria
That's one of the really awful things about asthma. No matter what causes it to happen, an asthma attack *causes* anxiety, just by not being able to breathe right, and that's both a good and a bad things; good because anxiety triggers the CNS, which lights up the breathing center in the brain like it's New Years in Times Square (you sure won't be sleeping while there's an asthma attack going on)... bad because anxiety actually causes you to *need* to breathe more, which you can't because you're having an asthma attack! It's a horrible terrifying vicious cycle, and you keep telling yourself, calm down, you're just making it worse... but calming down, when you can't breathe right? Yeah right.
It's hard for me to grasp how people survived asthma before there was albuterol and all the other bronchodilators. When you have to deal with crap like this, you sure don't need thick gluey VG in there, crapping things up even worse!
Andria
I feel you. The predisposition to asthma runs in my family, with my grand father who lived as a farmer and black-smith in the mountains of North Africa. No Albuterol for him but quite a natural healthy life style and natural remedies... My son 8 developed severe asthma at ~6 month old. I became very anxious with these frequent crisis, admissions to ICU until I learn how to anticipate the crisis, the appropriate treatments (some nasty, but necessary) and schedules, the right set of actions, the use the lab tests, reveling a very broad range of allergies to prevent exposures to allergens. Really challenging and scary stuff... but no ICU for about 3-4 years now. Advair (its equivalent) seemed to help as a preventive treatment. I am progressively stopping this treatment because he's been doing pretty good for about 2 years now, with minor crisis. I am not sure it's right but the doc gave me a green light. Reading your post tells me that more tools are available for him to manage his Asthma. I've been working on a few already and we can learn more, especially from people like you. He is a very bright and awesome kid and that helps a lot.
I have a feeling what happened to you with that big long test would also happen to alot of people who vape.
One of the worst attacks I ever had was in response to a severe allergy attack -- we spent xmas eve watching videos at a friend's house, who neglected to inform us that her cat had just had kittens.
One cat, and I could take an antihistamine and deal with it; a houseful of kittens with their fluff all over, in the air and on every surface... definitely not. The worst thing about it was that I was pregnant at the time -- so even when I went to the e-room, the wouldn't even give me oxygen -- could be very bad for the unborn, leaving them liable if my son had been born compromised in any way. So I had to just go home and deal with it as best I could -- there was no sleep that night, that's for sure. At the time, I didn't know the leaning-forward technique, but I did learn that lying down is a bad thing to do when there's an asthma attack going on, and it's useless anyway, since your CNS won't allow you to sleep.Even if your son stops the regular use of Advair, you may want to keep one of the inhalers around for use when he has some other situation that has a negative impact on the asthma -- a bad cold, the flu, or even chest pain -- the steroids will help the inflammation that causes chest pain. That used to be the only time I would use a steroidal med, if I had something else that made the asthma even worse.
I recall reading that there's an herbal medicine that helps asthma, but the name escapes me at the moment. A sign of CRS syndrome no doubt.
Andria
I'm just curious, can you explain why? Is there some sort of connection you're suggesting? I'm just curious.
Also, @AndriaD no, no blood-gas thing. They had me breathe for like 20 mins with nothing while they recorded it, I was fine. Then they had me breathe for another little white after inhaling saline from a nebulizer, I was fine. Then they gave me that drug methacholine (sp?) in a nebulizer. I was fine. Then they gave me more of it. Fine. So on and so on til vial 4 of it then I was not fine. There are 5 vials so I made it to 4 tho lol.
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