Some background on Doug:
Subj: Douglas 5 5/26/2001
Hello All
"Like breathing through a wet collapsing paper straw. I know something is
going on around me, but all I can focus on is drawing in each breath -filling
my lungs as full as possible before sliding down that tunnel and trying to
breath again." It may sound like I'm talking about breathing at 29,000 ft,
but it is actually something I wrote when I was 13 trying to describe what it
was like for me having an asthma attack. Most of you know my medical history
some of you don't. When I was two and a half years old I had open-heart
surgery and for most of my childhood I suffered from severe asthma keeping me
in and out of hospitals. Though today, my asthma is usually induced by a
select few allergens, back then it included physical activity and the cold. I
spent a lot of my youth looking out windows watching other kids play. I
remember one Christmas when I was seven I got a brand new bicycle. I was so
happy I rode it the five blocks in the cold winter air down to a family
friends house to show it to him. I had a severe asthma attack and ended up
spending the rest of the Christmas holiday and part of the next school year
in Hospital. It was there, in the hospital, that sometimes in those damp
oxygen tents that would fog up closing out the world and allowing me to
create my own, where I discovered some of the explorers who would sail their
Kon Tiki rafts across the Pacific, who would race to the Poles like Perry or
Scott, or like Sir Edmund Hillary would seek another kind of Pole. Maybe it's
just human nature, that the one thing denied me as a child, to just run, ski,
play in the cold, became my passions as an adult. My greatest weakness, my
cardiovascular system, became the thing I pushed the most with rowing,
running marathons, pursuing high altitude climbing. It is my belief (though
not a medical opinion) that testing and taxing that system is what
strengthened it. Pushing it, nearly killed me on a couple of occasions, but I
feel I came out stronger for it. So, with a lot of determination, persistence
and sometimes stupidity and with the help of the Canadian and American Heart
and Lung Associations and Doctors like Andrew Murray (who saved my life on
more than one occasion) and family, friends and coaches, I started to get
better. There were a lot of people there (mostly out of love) who told me all
the things I "shouldn't do", I "couldn't do". "It was stupid given my
condition." There were others who told me I could do anything I set my mind
to. So to both groups, I thank you. To the one for inspiring me to prove you
wrong and to the other for helping me peruse that proof because on May 23rd
at 8:30am I wasn't the sick little boy looking out the window watching
someone else, but was standing on top of the world at 29,028 ft. and it felt great.All the best, Doug.
