“Breathe, honey. C’mon, Lucho, sweetheart, breathe….” I am 8 years old, responding to Lucho, my family nickname, surrounded by darkness with an ever-growing monster pressing on my chest. I know this feeling, this terror; I am growing used to this fear of asthma rising from my lungs as the rest of the world sleeps. It is so severe that the dander raised from petting the neighbor’s cat has sent me to the hospital not once, but three times.
If we mowed the lawn, grass clippings could send me to the emergency room. I’m that pale, wheezy kid, squinting at the bright sunshine, as often I am forced to stay inside and watch the world go by through the living-room window.
“Mom? Mom is that you?” I suspect we are off to the hospital, where I will play the role of human pincushion yet again for more allergy tests.
“Mom?”
“NO, we aren’t going to the emergency room. Dammit, you useless moron, wake the fuck up and stop calling me Mom!”
Fuzzy-headed, I am hearing the hiss of oxygen; it sounds like the hospital, but it’s so cold. Am I dreaming? Really cold now, hospitals are always so cold, but now feeling something cold on my face Why would they put ice on my face?
“Mom?”
UNDERWRITTEN BY
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“GODDAMIT, YOU IDIOT—WAKE UP!”
Okay, Mom doesn’t talk like that. This realization snaps me back to reality. I focus my eyes and can just make out the little nylon coffin I am squeezed into with one of my best friends, the climber and photographer Didrik Johnck. As the wind screams around our tent like a banshee, I open my eyes to see Didrik looking like a space-age aardvark, with an oxygen mask, the sort that jet pilots use, strapped to his face. The only thing I see sticking out of his sleeping bag is the snout of his mask and his concerned eyes above it.
“Welcome back to Planet Earth, amigo,” he says. “Glad you could join us.”
“Dude, what the fuck happened?” I ask. “I really flipped out there.”
“You were talking and thrashing in your sleep, so I leaned over to check your O2 bottle, and you were out. Basically, you were sucking on a mask attached to an empty bottle that was therefore suffocating you, dipshit.”
What a good friend. We are at Camp IV on Mount Everest. It’s May 2001, on the cusp of our summit day with Erik Weihenmayer. It’s been a long time, and hundreds of grueling mountain summits, since I’ve felt the panic of being unable to breathe, but the memory of my disability is at the core of who I am.
Growing up as a kid just outside St. Louis, I suffered hundreds of asthma attacks. My chest would tighten up and my breathing would become shallow. (In Greek, asthma means panting.) Then I’d start to wheeze, high-pitched, an alarm, and if I could speak it was only in bursts—and then the fear began. In an asthma attack, I’m struggling to fill my lungs, raising my shoulders to my ears, extending my arms—anything to expand the chest cavity. It’s the same feeling when you are out of air on a run, exhausted, but with asthma there’s no slowing down to get relief. My speech is gone. I can’t even call out for help.
My heart is pounding from my entire body straining to draw air. My eyes are popping out, and I’m turning pale. I can see the alarm on my mom’s face as I’m slowly being strangled to death.
“Higher Ground: How the Outdoor Recreation Industry Can Save the World”
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An asthma attack occurs when the bronchial tubes spasm and fill with fluid, restricting airflow to the alveoli. You lose this most essential survival function: respiration. Asthma isn’t an infection, but the body reacts as if it’s been attacked. It’s terrifying, and unless the symptoms abate, it can result in death. Currently, there are 25 million Americans with asthma, and even now there’s no one treatment or cure. Asthma is described as a syndrome with many different characteristics and causes, from genetics to environment.
In my case, it usually started when I was exposed to an allergen. Mold, pollen, ragweed, the neighbors’ cat—all could put me into that terrifying, oxygen-less state. Even with my steroid inhalers to stave off many of the attacks, we still made hundreds of visits to the hospital. Our house was twenty minutes outside the city in farm country, which meant there were tons of particulates in the air, and that the trip to the ER was that much longer. We’d end up there as many as six times a month. I had two inhalers and a nebulizer at home. I felt deeply defective.
Part of the pressure was that my father had grown up in an Ecuadorian ranching family, in which time working outside in the fresh air was seen as a virtue. It was difficult for him to understand my limitations, especially as he was putting in very long hours working as an aerospace engineer. My mom, a primary-school art teacher, minded less, encouraging me on my inward journeys of self-expression when I was trapped indoors. My brother and sister didn’t come along till much later, so all my years of physical struggle came mostly as an only child, much to my parents’ relief.
I remember the visits to Dr. Boles’s office for my weekly allergy tests when I was eight. They’d apply a board studded with pins to my back, each coated in some allergen. If the pinpricks caused a reaction—swelling and redness—then they’d circle the spot in Sharpie and add that allergen to the list. My mom called them “sad little Sharpie circles.” As I sat on the white butcher paper on the examination table and they added another nine allergens to my list, Dr. Boles told my mom: “You are going to have to get used to the idea of Luis not being a very active kid. Consider him the boy in the bubble.”
One problem with the steroid inhalers is that they caused hyperactivity. It was hard for me to sit still in school. After a couple blasts off the inhaler, my heart felt like it was going to pound out of my chest. Then, as with a sugar high, I’d crash and fall asleep in class. Recess was no help in blowing off steam because I was forced to stay inside. So there I was, the pale, wheezy, now-hyperactive kid stuck inside, alone when all the other kids were outside playing. It was involuntary introversion, torturous and lonely for a natural extrovert.
Reading became my everything. My parents had a wall of bookshelves in the living room. As a teacher, my mom loved books, and as an immigrant, my dad was motivated to learn English through reading. With so much time indoors avoiding allergens, I was reading at an eighth-grade level by second grade. Somewhat strangely, my favorite reading material was a set of Peanuts-branded encyclopedias, Charlie Brown’s Super Book of Questions and Answers, volumes divided into animals, earth science, mechanical workings, and geography. Because I could rarely focus in school, most of my elementary education came from those books. (I recently bought the set from a rare bookseller on the internet for my daughter, Sofia.) Ultimately, too, it was reading that gave me the inspiration to move through asthma.
One day, deep into my father’s collection of National Geographics, I came across the September 1963 issue with an article about the first American expedition to Mount Everest. On that climb was a man who had also been afflicted with asthma as a child. Jim Whittaker became the first American to summit Everest (and later, the first CEO of the outdoor-retail giant REI). I clearly remember dragging this magazine into my parents’ bedroom and pointing to his picture and saying, “This guy has what I have, and if he can climb Everest, so can I. That’s what I want to do—I want to be a mountain guide and climb Everest.”
Luis Benitez grew up in the Midwest and has worked as a high-end international mountain guide, with six Everest summits to his name; outdoor educator; and, most recently, a policy leader in the outdoor industry. In 2015, Benitez was appointed by Colorado Gov. John Hickenlooper to lead the Outdoor Recreation Industry Office. He currently serves as chief impact officer for the nonprofit Trust for Public Land. Benitez holds an executive MBA from the University of Denver, with an emphasis certification on behavioral sciences and public policy from Harvard University’s Kennedy School of Government. He co-authored “Higher Ground” with Frederick Reimers.
