you don’t leave your house for four days and everything changes. your car grows impossibly taller, air touching your skin is a whole new experience, and your neighbors have put plastic deer out on the lawn.
i realized that it’s not that my lungs have gotten better which caused the longer periods of free breathing between fits, but that i have adjusted everything about how i move and breathe to accommodate the fact that my lungs are now half the size they used to be. (the other half is orange. i don’t know why this is so; but you can trust me on the color.)
if, for example, you time your pace with your exhale and breathe shallowly all the time, you can actually walk down the hallway and back without collapsing onto a couch at the end and dying. it’s brilliant! i think my adaptability skills could conquer an ocean. throw me in the middle and i could grow fins and gills.