I'm anti-ageing MY LUNGS

When a chronic and incurable disease damaged Anita Brough’s lungs, the 59-year-old took back control with yogic breathwork

- JOHANNA BELL

They say bad things come in threes, but when my dad died suddenly in February 2012 while my son was battling a brain tumour, I hoped life wouldn’t be cruel enough to offer up a third crisis. I was wrong, because I was then diagnosed with a chronic and incurable disease that left me with the lungs of an 80-year-old in my fifties. I’d always been fit and healthy, but when my son fell ill in November 2011, I focused everything on him.

With no time for my usual bootcamp and trampoline workouts, I’d raced up and down the hospital stairs, using the stairwell as my own personal gym. My dad Ernest’s death just a few months later was completely heartbreaking. Aged 84, his heart simply stopped. He just laid down and went to sleep.

When my son came home in August 2013, my hospital stair workouts stopped and I didn’t restart any other exercise. It wasn’t until we were back at the hospital a few months later and I became breathless using the stairs that I realised something was wrong. That time off shouldn’t have left me gasping for breath. Wondering if I had stress-related asthma, I saw my GP, and was referred to a respiratory consultant.

Diagnosis COPD

After various lung tests I was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD); a killer respiratory disease where the airways are permanently inflamed and narrowed, making it difficult to breathe air out. I was terrified. Even more so when I discovered it was progressive and incurable. And though there are causes other than smoking, I couldn’t help but blame my 20 years as a social smoker in my youth. I was given an inhaler, but as my breathing got worse I was too frightened of ending up on an oxygen machine to exercise.