As a university fresher you might worry about getting homesick, testing out rogue recipes on your housemates and making new friends. What you shouldn’t have to worry about is leaving the house because air pollution might trigger a life-threatening asthma attack.
But in 2013 that’s exactly what happened to me. I’d swapped life in rural Shropshire for the big smoke to study English Literature at Royal Holloway, University of London. I couldn’t wait to live in a big city and get stuck into university life. But after just two weeks of arriving in London, breathing in filthy fumes left me wheezing and fighting for my life.
According to Asthma UK, around 3.3million people find their asthma is affected by air pollution. I’m one of them and toxic air puts me at higher risk of having a deadly asthma attack. There is now strong evidence to show that air pollution is linked to the development and worsening of asthma in both children and adults. What’s even more alarming is that recent medical research has found that traffic fumes stunt children’s lung growth, making them more susceptible to developing asthma.
Before moving to London, my asthma was relatively mild and under control but on moving to the capital my asthma came back with a vengeance. It began after I had been on a night out with friends in the city. My asthma was playing up and I kept on having to go outside the club to use my reliever inhaler, but after a while it didn’t seem to be helping. On the way back home from the station, I said to my housemate: “I can’t breathe.” I felt like someone had their hands around my throat. I collapsed, and the rest is a bit of a blur. All I remember is thinking: Is this the last breath I’m going to take? I was resuscitated in the back of an ambulance. Doctors battled to save me. When medicines didn’t work they had to intubate me, inserting a tube into my lungs to help me breathe. I was then put into an induced coma for ten days.
Whilst I was able to go back to uni, the next three years saw me in and out of hospital a further eight times after suffering major asthma attacks. Precious time that I should have spent hitting the books and making new friends were overshadowed by traumatic moments in the back of an ambulance or being rigged up to dozens of tubes in hospital to help me breathe.
Doctors said that air pollution was likely to be the cause of my worsening asthma, but I couldn’t move out of London – I was determined to finish my degree.
After three tumultuous years, and successfully completing my degree, my asthma consultant said that pollution was affecting my asthma so badly that staying in London was putting me at risk of further asthma attacks. I had ambitions to stay put and do conversion course in law, but I didn’t want to take the risk anymore. For me, air pollution was deadly. I moved back home to Shropshire and I finally felt like I could breathe again. I now commute to Birmingham twice a week to do my barrister training.
Pollution has had a huge impact on my life, forcing me to move out the city which I had fallen in love with and it stole any chance of me working as a criminal lawyer in London where most of the opportunities are. Not only that but it’s blighting the health of future generations. How is this acceptable and what will it take for the government to listen?
That’s why I’m campaigning with Asthma UK this Clean Air Day to ask for the government to clean up the UK’s toxic air and make it a safer place for people with asthma. The government must commit to legally binding World Health Organisation air quality standards in the UK, so that we can all breathe clean air.