I don't take any of the medications I took when I was younger: antibiotics, antacids, aspirin, asthma inhalers, ulcer medication, allergy shots.
Without the EPA and the national pollution safeguards it enforces, more children would have asthma. Our water would be less safe. More chemicals would poison our bodies. And more people would die prematurely from respiratory diseases and heart attacks.
I don't want folks with pre-existing medical conditions - like asthma and diabetes - to be denied health care. I sure don't want to see our grandparents paying more for prescription drugs and women paying more just because of their gender.
I'm an asthmatic so if you want to ask someone about asthma, ask a doctor. I'm asthmatic but I'm not an expert on it.
I know from my constituency what is going on. Doctors that are told, begged, by mothers, 'Please don't write down that my child as asthma. Please lie and say it's bronchitis, because if you write down asthma, when my child turns 18 or 20 and has to get his or her own insurance, it will be a pre-existing condition.'
My interest was directed, from my medical student days, to Immunology, and particularly to the mechanism of hypersensitivity. I had suffered from bronchial asthma as a child and had developed a deep curiosity in allergic phenomena.
I began writing poems when I was about eight, with a heavy assist from my mother. She read me Arthur Waley's translations and Whitman and Robinson Jeffers, who have been lifelong influences on me. My father read Keats to me, and then he read more Keats while I was lying on the sofa struggling with asthma.
Between 1991 and 1997 I had really serious asthma.
If you ever get injured or have an asthma attack, the last words you get out are, 'Sammy Davis suite, please.' That's, like, three rooms on the eighth floor of Cedars-Sinai.
Being an athlete in a cold-weather sport is really difficult to deal with the asthma.
