I’ve been plagued with asthma since I’ve been two years old. It’s a nasty condition: when you have a full-blown asthma attack, trying to breathe is like breathing through one of those tiny coffee-stirring straws. Air actually can go in to your lungs just fine (unless you’re having a really bad attack), but breathing out is the difficult part. Your lungs spasm; the smooth muscles that line the bronchial tubes contract, narrowing the airways; in addition, the lung tissues can also swell, and excess mucous can be produced, further blocking the airways. Your chest feels tight, like a weight is sitting on you. I’ve even heard it said that an asthma attack can feel like a heart attack. And I know of at least one doctor who believed he was having an asthma attack when he was, in actually, having a heart attack (two hours later, he was under the knife, undergoing a quadruple bypass operation).

Last Sunday, Jennifer and I were cleaning the house. I’d been short of breath for the entire day and the day before, but had shrugged it off, figuring it was the side effect of the new hypertension medication that my physician had given me. But on Sunday night it got so bad that I had I to have Jennifer take me to the emergency room. I guess more than sick, I was annoyed that this was the second time in two weeks that I’ve had to go to the emergency room, after being away from hospitals for over a year (the time prior to that, I was in for a week for pneumonia). Some day I hope to go for an entire year without having to go in for one problem or another. While I was in the emergency room on Sunday night, Jennifer stayed with me the whole time, making me laugh and smile, and generally keeping me cheered up. She made some observations about the sounds in the ER resembling a routine by Stomp, and that made me laugh through the facemask that the respiratory therapist had hooked me up to.

One thing that’s been pounded into me since I was a child with asthma has been the importance of relaxing when you’re in the midst of an asthma attack. Becoming tense or nervous will actually make the asthma attack worse. So while sitting in a doctor’s office or in an emergency room, the doctor will always tell me, "Just keep yourself calm. Stressing about it will only make it worse."

Easy for them to say, I’ve always though in response to that. They’re not the ones who can’t breathe at all! It’s awfully easy to panic when your air is cut short, when you can’t draw a breath (a really bad asthma attack will prevent you from inhaling as well as exhaling), when you’re light-headed from lack of oxygen, and the only thing you can think of is where your next inhalation is going to come from. Still, it’s true; if you can relax, then you will start to feel better, and it actually does become easier to breathe.

Generally, deep breathing is a good way to relax, calm down, and get a grip on things. When you’re in the middle of an asthma attack, of course, it’s impossible to take some deep breaths and calm down that way. But at other times…

Breathe in deeply…

Exhale.

Patience is also key when you’re suffering an asthma attack. Asthma is a temporary condition and when you have an attack, it will go away, assuming proper treatment. But when you’re desperate for air, it’s hard to be patient.

So you’d think that after struggling with asthma for nearly thirty years, I’d be a pro at being patient, right?

Yeah, right.

I wrote in an earlier journal entry that I could learn about patience and determination from the adult literacy students that I was working with. I did learn some of those lessons; but I seem to have forgotten some of them.

So here I am, five months later, in my new job, far away from the administrative assistant position I used to hold at the University, and still frustrated by the direction my career is taking. It’s not, of course, what I want; but is it realistic to really expect to have reached my ultimate career goal at this point?

So, here goes. Inhale deeply. Exhale.

My first non-administrative job started on July 10. My new job started about a month after that. In four months, I’ve gone from an administrative assistant position in the Human Resources division of a large University to being part of an enterprise-level web development team. I used to work with the front end of an ancient FoxPro application; now I’m answering questions about PL/SQL and Oracle8i, as well as Unix development and some basic functions in Perl.

Still, it’s not what I ultimately want, which is to take leadership roles in the development of large enterprise-scale web-based database applications and in their deployment. I consider myself an expert HTML/JavaScript developer at this point (even though I’ve pushed my HTML skills as far as I want to, and no longer feel challenged by HTML development), and a decent SQL programmer, and a beginner at Oracle. So is it even likely that I’d get my dream career at this point, with only four months of experience?

Then again, there is also a part of me which worries that I’ve moved too slowly. I got a late start in this career, after all; I’m 32 years old now, and most of the people I’m working with are younger than I am, and more advanced in their own fields than I. Our Senior Oracle Programmer is just a bit older than I am, but has been programming for years. I suspect that as long as I’m in this field, I’m going to be playing a hectic game of catch up.

As you can probably tell, I’m dithering over my job again. When the new job you’re in isn’t where you’d hoped to be, it’s easy to forget that between where you start and where you want to end up, there is a road that you must travel; just as there is a period of less-than-perfect breathing between a severe asthma attack and a pair of well-functioning lungs.

Your lungs will clear. You will get that dream job.

I’ve only been with this company for four months, and I’ve started poking around to see what else might be out there for other jobs. A couple of weeks ago, when it became clear that I wasn’t going to be receiving training in Oracle or programming and that I might be stuck doing nothing but HTML in this job, it seemed like a good idea. But now that I’m able to converse intelligently with the corporate programmers about the Oracle database and even help out our local Unix guru with some Perl and Korn shell scripting, I’m starting to feel a bit better about where I’m going with this job. I’ve told my boss that I’m no longer interested in doing straight design and UI, and that I’d like to work on more back-end projects, including reporting and database development. We are working now on hiring a webmaster/developer who can focus on the UI and graphic design; but I personally had no idea how hard it would be to find qualified applicants for that sort of position.

I’m still not sure whether taking this job was the best move for my career, but perhaps it’s simply that slightly congested part of breathing that comes between a severe asthma attack and clear breathing… between a dead end job in administration and the job that I’m really looking for.