I had no idea asthma could be fatal.

Dear Bloggers, 

I let my thoughts go when I think up a worst case scenario as my wife is diagnosed with the final stage of Asthma. Something that was told at the doctors office a couple of weeks ago. 

Somehow it is waiting untill things go terribly wrong. I imagine it like this.
At 7.50am, my wife left for work in her car as usual, dropping off our youngest at the day care centre on he way. I had to start earlier and do my rounds with the bus.

She texted me: “Can you take care of diner today?”she tapped.

I phoned her back and we chatted about the plans for that evening. We ended the ­conversation as always by saying: “Love you.”

A couple of minutes later, she was dead.

She’d driven into the side of a lorry after suffering a fatal asthma attack.
For us the rest of the family of four, her death came as a bolt from the blue. Shocking are the  statistics as they show that one person dies from asthma every eight hours.

But a new review, that will investigate the cause of asthma deaths, is hoping to reduce that number to two or three every year so that cases like my wife’s will become few and far between.

The review will ask GPs and ­hospital doctors for information to identify factors leading up to an asthma death, including the ­medication a patient was taking and whether a patient had any attacks in the run-up to their death.

On the morning she dropped our daughter at day care, nothing was out of the ordinary.
“She’d taken her inhalers the night before and in the morning and she didn’t seem unwell,” just an other day. “It was only when her boss at the telecom firm where she worked called me to say that she hadn’t turned up! I really started to worry.

“I knew something terrible had happened because she was if it comes to work she’s ­always punctual. I had a broken shift and I went home during the break, worried sick hoping to find her in bed or something similair.

I rang the police to see if they knew of any accidents but they couldn’t tell me anything. Then, at 10.10am, two police officers turned up at the door.

“They told me there had been a road traffic accident involving my wife. The officers had taken their hats off and said they were really sorry. I knew then she was dead. 

It was like the whole world stopped. I went into ­automatic gear, phoning her workplace to let them know what had happened, then I went to the school to tell the children their mum was dead. It was probably the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.”

I never thought asthma would kill her.

She first developed the condition when he was 12 shortly after she went to another school it started being allergic to many things and she got some medication to stop it, when I met her she was 23 years old and her hands were a mess because she was reacting allergic to the Christmas tree. In Januari we bought a fake tree and I took her to her Phd. The evening before she had a severe Asthma attack and her lips turned blue due to the lack of oxygen. Her doctor was a bit hardheaded to admit that this would be asthma. So I pushed him verbally in a corner and he send us of to a specialist. A couple of weeks later she got a better life by having the right doses of medication.

 “We don’t know if this triggered her asthma but from then on she started to take Ventolin and Becotide inhalers,” the lungspecialist says.
As the years passed, She became increasingly prone to chest infections and I have to admit that after the breakdown after having our first child and several miscarriages, she began to smoke 15 cigarettes a day due to a lot of stress.

“She gave up for a while when we expected our second child and no I was not very supportive during those years but then she started smoking again. I was always nagging at her to take her inhalers when she was wheezy but she didn’t always listen.”

Her first wake-up call came in 2011 when she suffered a bout of pneumonia. She spent five days in bed where i still think she should have gone to the hospital. At the time she was taking a Ventolin inhaler and Seretide 250, a steroid preventer ­inhaler. Nothing really worked. After a Prednisolone treatment she recovered.

Her second bout came in February this year, when she had an attack of coughing syncope, a ­violent coughing ­episode which caused her to pass out.
A month later, she suffered a similar attack but this time he was behind the wheel of the car. It proved to be fatal.

“The postmortem showed a massive asthma attack, which means she probably passed out and drove into the lorry,” says the report. 
“She had all her inhalers with her in the car when she died.”

The lorry driver was totally blameless and it was an accidental death.

I am thinking back at our days that we met.  “It was a strange way to meet but we bumped into each other at the station and a few weeks later I took her out. We were both separated in a bad way in a former relationship. Eventhough I did not believe in love anymore after I was stood up again, creepy but after nearly five years of being single not wanting anything to do with women, I ­totally fell for her smile and a fair sense of humour.

“Asthma was always a problem for her and it did increasingly affect her day-to-day life. Simply running around with the children made her out of breath. But we thought her condition was under control and I still find it hard to believe that asthma could kill her.

 “Thank God we did many fun things together because we now treasure those memories if we would be losing her so unexpectedly. My point is even if your not that rich live life as best as you can. This is crucial and everyone must understand how deadly asthma can be.”

This story is just the freedom of my thoughs, It is still not too late for my wife as she is still around but this might be a realistic scenario. For her there might not be that many options left but it’s not too late for other asthma sufferers. 

“I want everyone to know that ­asthma can kill, because I didn’t know until it was told to me by a physician.

“I wish we’d known how deadly asthma can be because then, I would have made absolutely sure she took all her inhalers.” Here is a simple test: If you can breathe normal just put a straw in your mouth and try to breathe through it, don’t forget to block your nostrils as well. That is how many Asthma sufferers feel when they have an attack.

The Old Sailor,

For what?

Dear Bloggers,

Today I will write about so called senseless violence, it is one of the items that kept my family busy after the horrible news from Norway on 22th of July. We wandered what happens to person that can get so violent without any regrets killing a large amount of people. The attacks on the Twin Towers in New York came out of nothing and without any pre warnings. Several years ago Meindert Tjoelker was kicked to death by a group of drunk guys only because he was telling them that heir behavior was inappropriate. There might be more cases but for me these are stuck in my memories as matters of senseless violence.

One of the problems with any reflection on absurd forms of violence in society is that these thoughts can never be, from a scientific point of view, truly interesting and technical. Before we know it, moral and political considerations and emotions sneak in and objective thought will be overruled by, for example, the indignation over the nature and amount of that violence. For if you start to think about violence, you will soon feel highly involved and at the same time completely powerless. Even if we should be inclined to choose violence in certain cases, when it comes from ourselves, when it is not the raw violence of nature and looks like reasonable action, it always turns out to be bigger and stronger in its consequences and its emotional implications than the one who unleashes violence or approves of it. Merely by thinking about it it is taken out of our own hands.

No matter what we think or how passionately we want to denounce violence as vulgar, immoral or inefficient, it will still occur time after time and we are never neutral bystanders, like when observing the behavior of chickens on a lawn or dogs in the street. Our words are filled with emotions and prejudices. Therefore, I want to restrict my reflection on to a couple of words, with which we appear to try and make sense of an occurrence on which we apparently, despite all of our pretenses, have as little influence as on the weather, but which fascinates us, either annoyingly or amusingly, in a much higher degree.



The quite recent combination of words “senseless violence” mostly seems to relate to something that we, if it did not sound as cynical, could call recreational violence, eventhough it happens in small groups that will kill an innocent guy by kicking him to death as he would try to stop them from demolishing a bicycle, or a large group called supporters which appears predominately around soccer-fields, in amusement halls with violent war games and in so-called action movies, hence on the fringes of social life. But how large, how infectious and how determining of our culture is the contribution of this type of violence as a spectacle in television shows and other forms of relaxation on which we spend a large part of our free time? (My wife is a big fan of these what I call “Murder and manslaughter tv series”.) Do I have an excorsist in the house?



The combination of words “senseless violence” seems to have been specifically invented to qualify this pointless violence as a derailment or at least a singular occurrence, in order to not too suddenly and quite radically, exclude the possibility of a human violence that might be called “sensible”. That not senseless, but efficiently and prudently used violence would be in our control from beginning to end, and a predictable and positive outcome could be expected: order, security, and peace.

Seen from this perspective, the expression “senseless violence” has to create a space for the belief that another, perhaps efficient, meaningful and permissible unleashing of violence might be possible. Taking the soccer game as an example again. There are complaints that some parents being so fanatic that they scare their own children as their fanatism will end up into an escalation of violence as an exercise in power by the lower less responsible persons and that can prevent that by slogans like “soccer is war” a spiral of spectacular, but meaningless recreational violence will start.



Along with more power, the means not only have to be greater in number, but also more effective, and they have to appear less like the force of an aimless explosion, the raw violence of a hurricane or the unrestrained behavior of a rowdy crowd. A government that does not have these available, is not superior and has no more say than any random club.

The result of violence is always characterized by a hail of unintended, incalculable and destructive side-effects sensible, unless of course we read the word “goal” as something military and war-like, “hit” as the destruction of this goal and “use” as the unleashing of every random force that we do not control. In this way, the guillotine could be regarded as an effective mean for relieving headaches, or pulling all teeth as an adequate means against biting nails. (there is a dark sense of humor needed here.)

Seeing a proof of superiority in this seems a bit shortsighted to me: it is rather a manifestation of impotence or inability to link adequate and carefully dosed means. At best we can say that in certain circumstances in a somewhat ritual way we have reserved the authority to exert this impotence or the threat thereof and necessitated ourselves to leave out the, in this context painful, qualification senseless. But the question is wether this is more than a mere verbal and ritual exercise that does not change a thing about the situation itself.

There seem to be at least two reasons why we speak in such hidden terms about all kinds of violence, including that of the government. One is that a start of violence or a display of superiority can cause a shock that may bring people to their senses. (Just think about what happened in Oslo and on Utoya or less recent the 9-11 attacks.)



If you, for example, want to quiet a boisterous crowd, you sometimes have to quickly produce a higher volume of sound than the bothersome murmur you intend to override. This will increase the total disorder, but still the expectation can be that silence will be its effect. There are reasons to believe in temporary violence and in the logic of something like a warning shot.

A second reason not to radically rule out every form of violence as a means has to lie in the fact that to this form of active performing there seems to be but one alternative, i.e. standing by powerlessly. But that alternative has to be rejected more forcefully according the measure in which the organization that would decline from performing it is ascribed greater power or authority.

And if you are supposed to have all capabilities, you will always be guilty when you stand by powerlessly. In an activist culture, one that for the greater part is a culture of violence disguised as sport, as expression, as display of power or as spectacle rather than a culture of peaceful technique and of adequate and subtle means, standing by powerlessly or even the acceptance of powerlessness is always regarded as reprehensible. In the phraseology of that culture it is always better to do something than to do nothing at all or, in military terms less familiar to me: it is better to miss or even obliterate the goal than not to shoot at all. This will inevitably lead to absurd situations.



Even if peace would be no more than the absence of war and violence (but how will we ever know?) and even if it has to be maintained by a power that keeps itself in the background, it would still be preferable as a form of civilization to the outbursts of barbaric violence which we have to witness, happening to our shame, time and time again and on all fronts.

I wish that there would be no more victims of senseless violence but this probably an impossible dream.

The Old Sailor,