Is asthma from the past 30 years or the past 7 months?

[mrsfogy]

There might be a thread about this type of thing somewhere so I apologize if I am doubling.....

I was a smoker for 30 years, 1 - 2 packs a day. The last 2 years or so of smoking, I would cough up a lot of disgusting crap and had typical smokers cough but nothing too crazy.

I quit 7 months ago, thanks to vaping. However, 2 months after I stopped smoking and started vaping, I was diagnosed with asthma because I have a persistent and constant wheezing. Did a lung x-ray and that was normal so I was happy about that. Albuteral (sp) didn't do anything for me so finally got put on a steroid inhaler and that works for me...no more wheezing (unless I don't use the inhaler, of course).

So, all that to say......Do you all think that the asthma/wheezing is due to the many years of smoking and was a coincidence that it came at the time it did? Do you think it is from vaping? Why now?

I was scared it was cancer and I was going to be that girl who smoked 30 years, quit and then got lung cancer 2 months later. I thank God that the xrays were normal; there is no minimizing that!!! However, now I am "that girl" who got asthma after quitting smoking (or is it started vaping).

What I DO NOT want to do is to stop vaping to see if the wheezing goes away because I know the only thing I will do is pick up a cigarette and I know that is NOT the answer.

Any ideas? Any thoughts? Answers? haha Thanks in advance for any help.

 

[Whiskey]

I was experiencing the weezing just as I found and started vaping, smoked a little less in time than you .....2 things happened, I was told I had asthma and doc put me on Spiriva and I stopped smoking, EVERY bit of my wheezing stopped, so I wanna say the smoking caused it, but both vaping and medication, fixed it. Lung function tests showed major improvements, my take away was I benefited by giving up the smokes and switched to vaping.

 

[mrsfogy]

@Whiskey - Do you still have to take your medicine, the Spiriva? Like, forever? Or are you completely off of meds and you no longer have the wheezing? Thank you for your response

 

[Whiskey]

I still have to take it , every year I get checked, they tell me if it's working good for me to stay on it, I suppose I should try to go without it and see what it is like now that you mention it. I do know that if I am late in using the inhaler I do feel the wheezing start again.

 

[Teresa P]

There is a condition called "smoker's asthma" and you could have had it for awhile now without knowing. Just speculation, not a medical opinion.

 

[Whiskey]

There is a condition called "smoker's asthma" and you could have had it for awhile now without knowing. Just speculation, not a medical opinion.

I am sure that is what mine is then

 

[Teresa P]

I still wheeze occasionally but allergy season is at peak here in the mountains. But I don't think that's all of it, I've had to do some damage smoking all those years.

 

[Whiskey]

Agreed, I had the smokers cough too, I knew it was the smokes

 

[nightshard]

Been using Ventolin inhaler since childhood and up until I stopped smoking, also had a sharp pain in the lower part of my left lung during my last year of smoking.
The pain is gone and so is the inhaler.

 

[AndriaD]

There might be a thread about this type of thing somewhere so I apologize if I am doubling.....

I was a smoker for 30 years, 1 - 2 packs a day. The last 2 years or so of smoking, I would cough up a lot of disgusting crap and had typical smokers cough but nothing too crazy.

I quit 7 months ago, thanks to vaping. However, 2 months after I stopped smoking and started vaping, I was diagnosed with asthma because I have a persistent and constant wheezing. Did a lung x-ray and that was normal so I was happy about that. Albuteral (sp) didn't do anything for me so finally got put on a steroid inhaler and that works for me...no more wheezing (unless I don't use the inhaler, of course).

So, all that to say......Do you all think that the asthma/wheezing is due to the many years of smoking and was a coincidence that it came at the time it did? Do you think it is from vaping? Why now?

I was scared it was cancer and I was going to be that girl who smoked 30 years, quit and then got lung cancer 2 months later. I thank God that the xrays were normal; there is no minimizing that!!! However, now I am "that girl" who got asthma after quitting smoking (or is it started vaping).

What I DO NOT want to do is to stop vaping to see if the wheezing goes away because I know the only thing I will do is pick up a cigarette and I know that is NOT the answer.

Any ideas? Any thoughts? Answers? haha Thanks in advance for any help.

I had adult-onset asthma develop when I was 24, after I'd been a smoker for 10 yrs, incidentally the same year I moved to Detroit (from metro Atlanta, which isn't very air-polluted, at least it wasn't in 1984-85). I continued smoking for another 29 yrs, and my asthma stayed mild, but yes, I coughed up A LOT, constantly, more than most smokers even, because of that annoying and distressing wheeze if I didn't -- I became an expert at getting that shit out.

When I switched to vaping in 2014, at first my asthma got better... then it got worse. It may have been due to a dual-use relapse for a month, or from the WTA I added to get that relapse under control, or... who knows, it could have had a lot of causes. Asthma is not easily analyzed, as to why any given aspect of the asthma occurs or gets worse -- they don't know what causes it, they only know what the symptoms are and how to (usually) relieve those symptoms.

It's possible the asthma would have occurred in any case, smoking, vaping, or even quit everything -- or, and this is what I truly suspect... you're vaping too much VG, which is aggravating the shortness-of-breath that's typical of asthma. You may have actual asthma, and without all that thick VG condensing on the airway walls, it's so mild you never really noticed it, other than that productive coughing.. I *have* heard from asthmatics that they can't use PG, and VG doesn't bother them, but the opposite is very definitely the case, in my caser -- I have to vape 85% PG, and late at night, after I've been vaping all day, I still get the wheezing, despite taking 2 doses of my Advair and using my Ventolin all day.

After 2 yrs of not smoking, over a year of Advair, and about 10 wks off the WTA, my asthma is finally beginning to be a bit more manageable, but it's a work in progress. I smoked for 39 yrs, 29 of them with asthma, so it may take some years for the problem to ease, or it might never, as long as I vape.

Try some high PG juice, for several days, and see if you feel any relief.

Andria

 

[Barbara E.]

I know three people who have given up their asthma medication since they've started vaping and stopped smoking. Thinking about it, they all use small to mid-range setups (no huge clouds).

 

[AndriaD]

I know three people who have given up their asthma medication since they've started vaping and stopped smoking. Thinking about it, they all use small to mid-range setups (no huge clouds).

That's what I've read too, that most asthmatics have seen dramatic improvements since switching to vaping. That's why I suspect that it's more VG-related, than "actual" asthma -- though it could be both, since adult onset asthma really can start up at any time; I haven't seen anyone else who's had that happen. But there are a good many of us who get wheezy with too much VG. It's just so thick!

Andria

 

[anavidfan]

There is a condition called "smoker's asthma" and you could have had it for awhile now without knowing. Just speculation, not a medical opinion.

Could be a number of things mentioned already in this thread , but an interesting thing is, that many decades ago, smoking was actually prescribed by doctors to alleviate asthma. Im not making this up. I have a good friend whos mother had asthma since she was a very young girl and doctor told her to smoke and it helped a LOT. This was over 50 years ago.

Of course after smoking for years along with the asthma , she developed COPD. Ive run into many older people who were prescribed smoking to help with pneumonia, asthma and other breathing problems. I suppose that since its a vaso constrictor it helped to alleviate any swelling in the pathways.

What Im saying is that maybe the symptoms were being masked by the smoking till you stopped. Also read an article regarding the additives in cigarettes and one of them was an antihistamine. Its added to cigarettes to mask the irritating affects of smoking so you think you are breathing fine.

Just a thought.

 

[AndriaD]

Could be a number of things mentioned already in this thread , but an interesting thing is, that many decades ago, smoking was actually prescribed by doctors to alleviate asthma. Im not making this up. I have a good friend whos mother had asthma since she was a very young girl and doctor told her to smoke and it helped a LOT. This was over 50 years ago.

Of course after smoking for years along with the asthma , she developed COPD. Ive run into many older people who were prescribed smoking to help with pneumonia, asthma and other breathing problems. I suppose that since its a vaso constrictor it helped to alleviate any swelling in the pathways.

What Im saying is that maybe the symptoms were being masked by the smoking till you stopped. Also read an article regarding the additives in cigarettes and one of them was an antihistamine. Its added to cigarettes to mask the irritating affects of smoking so you think you are breathing fine.

Just a thought.

All that and a bag of chips. They did indeed used to call them "asthma cigarettes." And not only is one of the ingredients something of an antihistamine, there are a couple that also function as bronchodilators. Considering that a) my asthma has always been mild, and b) in the last decade of my smoking, I didn't smoke very much (pk a day or less, as opposed to the 2-3 pks a day I smoked earlier), I'm thinking this is actually why my asthma seems to have worsened -- it hasn't really, but now I'm not getting the bronchodilators from cigarettes, AND, since I don't have all that tar and congestion in my lungs, it's become MUCH harder to cough up; it's a much drier cough now, and so takes a lot more effort.

Given that I smoked for 39 yrs, 29 of them as an asthmatic, it'll probably just take a good while to see big improvements, but after not smoking for nearly 2 yrs, I'm seeing *small* improvements -- I use the high-dose Advair, the 500/50, but I now use it only once a day, rather than the twice a day I needed it for a while; I have a different, milder maintenance inhaler I use at night, called Dulera, and though for a while I used the 200/10 version, now I use the 100/5 version, and it gets me thru the night well, so I don't wake up gasping.

Probably the BEST change I've seen with my asthma since I switched is that I DON'T wake up gasping, grabbing my rescue inhaler even before my eyes are open -- that was the norm for many, many years, and even before I got on the Advair and the other drug (I used no maintenance drugs when I smoked, only the rescue inhaler), that had ceased, after just 5 days smoke-free -- I'm no longer drowning in my own phlegm.

Andria