I've missed out on some of the recent growth in Ireland.
I was a latecomer to the property boom and a badly-off bystander to the 1990s stock-market boom. But there's one trend I was right on top of before it was either profitable or popular. It's the asthma boom.
Asthma is an inflammation of the airways that causes breathlessness and tightness in the chest. It carries a remote but real risk of death. Twenty years ago, about one in 20 Irish teenagers suffered from the disease. It now affects one teenager in five. Incidence has risen all over the world, but particularly in Ireland, the UK, Canada and Australia.
When I was diagnosed with asthma, in the late 1970s, there was little general knowledge of the condition. Asthma, what was that? Hard to pronounce, that's what it was. Azzma? Assma? And nobody knew what to do when confronted with a whistling, whispering mess that, depending on the pollen count on the day, might utter the occasional window-shattering sneeze as well. Is it going to explode or expire, they might wonder. Which emergency service should we call?
People seemed a little afraid, which was okay. This was childhood, and I took my status opportunities where I could get them. If being a bit of a medical freak was what it took to get some respect, then that was what it took.
Thankfully, I have only what my GP calls "a touch of asthma". But the symptoms of an attack are still unpleasant. You move like a rusty old bicycle, you sound like its broken pump, and breathing is like trying to inflate an accordion that someone's sitting on. The wheeze can be controlled by an inhaler, which sprays a steroid down your throat and usually offers immediate relief, or, if the wheeze persists, you can make your way to A&E to be "nebbed" - hooked up to a nebuliser machine, which delivers oxygen and steroid through a mask.
My first asthma memory is of a trip to a clinic, aged about five, for allergy tests. They listed the common allergens that can trigger an attack: feather pillows, house dust, hairy pets, running. Running? Here lay one of the few advantages of being an asthmatic child back then: I didn't have to show my contemporaries how bad I was at football, rugby and anything else involving a ball and a human being. Asthma was the ultimate get-out-of-sports-free card.
When I was about nine, the family doctor made me promise that I would never smoke. Pah! If asthmatics have weak chests, they seem to have even weaker wills. For some dark and unknown reason, almost every one I've known spent their adolescence smoking like, well, like non-asthmatics. I was no exception, starting at about 16. Within a year, the symptoms that had been in abeyance for some time came roaring back.
One day in 1989, I turned up at the college library, spluttering and wheezing at the end of a five-minute bike ride, and a friend lent me her inhaler. Prior to this, my treatment had been a small pink tablet that brought only slow relief. By contrast, the inhaler was an instant cure. I felt as if I'd just been transported to an advanced alien society.
It took me some time to realise that the inhaler wasn't just a handy antidote to cigarettes. Eventually, I quit smoking, but I stuck with the inhaler.
I now enjoy inhaler conversations with my fellow sufferers. "Aha, you're on the blue one. I've just been put on the brown yoke." Sometimes, the fellow sufferer has a rare, personally formulated, high-tech device, which they produce with a swagger, like Dirty Harry unholstering his .44 Magnum. Inhaler envy. Who'd have thought?
The rising incidence of asthma is thought to be due either to a specific environmental factor (chlorinated swimming pools are the latest possible culprits) or to the generalised mollycoddling effect of the western world, where we heat our homes too often, go outdoors too seldom, wash our hands too regularly and prescribe ourselves antibiotics at the first hint of a cold.
But if asthma is more common, in general it's also more manageable. In most cases, inhalers have reduced the disease to a minor inconvenience rather than a defining characteristic of one's life. I'll never beat an Amazonian Indian in a blowpipe contest, but in recent years asthma hasn't stopped me doing anything I wanted to.
My three-year-old daughter now has asthma. Of course. She takes two types of inhalers twice a day through a large plastic bulb called a Babyhaler. I hope she'll outgrow it, as many asthmatics do. I hope the next model of the Babyhaler doesn't look quite so much like a crack pipe. And I hope that, if she carries the asthma gene, she didn't inherit the smoking one. cgoodman@irish-times.ie
Róisín Ingle returns next week