I am one of the people you are protecting by social distancing

My day job used to fling me around the country, but mostly I pingponged between Anchorage and Washington, D.C. Every single trip from Alaska, I’d land on the East Coast dazed and jet-lagged, my body announcing it was hungry at 11 p.m. (7 p.m. Alaska time), and finally falling asleep around 3 or 4 a.m.

I’d drag myself out of bed in the morning on a few hours of sleep. I’d go running through the city, even if it was only a quick 30-minute jog. “This is my preventative health care,” I explained to anyone who would listen. My colleagues just thought I was a crazy, fitness-obsessed Alaskan (semi-true).

The full truth is buried deep in my lungs, in the form of mostly dormant asthma. I grew up as a chronic asthmatic. That’s such a sterile way to describe it, so how about this: I remember my very first time struggling to breathe, when I was 7 years old and waking up at a sleepover at a friend’s house. My friend’s mom, not knowing what else to do, parked me in the bathroom on a step stool where I could hang my head out the window for fresh air.

I remember gazing at the green grass in the backyard while struggling to inhale, trying to convince myself I felt a little better but also feeling tremendously confused about what was going on and scared about the vice-like tightness in my chest.

That was just the beginning. Over the next six years, asthma attacks seemed to come out of nowhere and routinely landed me in the ER, where depending on the severity of the attack and my recovery I was released or admitted. One year, I missed 130 out of 180 days of school due to hospitalizations and recovery.

This was back in the day when doctors prescribed antibiotics like they were going out of style, so I popped Z-Packs (Zithromax) on doctor’s orders multiple times a year to fend off pneumonia — a nice complement to the constant prednisone spikes and tapers that kept me puffy and achy, and whatever other cocktail of medications I was on at the time. Eventually, I had nebulizers at both of my parents’ homes so that we didn’t have to rush to the ER every time I had an attack that couldn’t be solved by a couple puffs of my rescue inhaler.

When I was 13, through several major environmental changes, my asthma almost disappeared overnight.

It was a decade-long haul to health. But now, to anyone who doesn’t know this history about me, I seem like someone who couldn’t be anything other than completely healthy. I write an outdoors column espousing the benefits of getting active and outside! I ride my bike to glaciers! I run really big races!

My lungs are clear. Sure, I puff on my inhaler before I exercise and I avoid dogs and cats due to allergies. But I am over-the-moon grateful that those are the only vestiges of the asthma that once completely defined me.

One of my primary motivators to get outside and stay healthy is to fend off the specter of my childhood asthma. Anyone who has seen or heard me gawk about how amazing the big, wide world is or how incredible it is that our bodies can do anything at all should understand that this sometimes obnoxious sense of wonder comes from the visceral comparison of what it’s like to be trapped in my body.

Here is the catch: My Achilles heel that relates back to my childhood asthma is that every single illness I catch tends to nosedive straight for my lungs. Common cold? It doesn’t matter; it starts in my nose and inevitably creeps downward until I have that sexy, baritone voice in the morning accompanied by the rake-coals-across-my-chest constant cough for weeks.

I become short of breath again, bringing me back to my youth, and I adopt the exciting full-time hobby of trying to cough up everything I can. (My husband loves it.) Recovery always takes a long time — at least a month. I find myself staring up the mountains I’m used to climbing, frustrated that my lungs aren’t recovered yet from whatever bug I caught and wondering if I’ll ever breathe normally again.

So when I heard about the novel coronavirus back in February, I quietly headed to Costco to refill my asthma medication and bought extra groceries to stick in the pantry (no, it did not occur to me to stockpile toilet paper). I kept running and going outside, but I became more cautious about indoor public spaces until eventually, like most of us, I stopped going at all.

This is not something I want to catch. This is not something I want to spread.

I’m writing this to personalize what it is we are doing in Alaska to protect each other from COVID-19. I want to make very clear that when we are talking about what can seem like faceless, nameless “community protections” that we are enacting through social distancing to protect each other and vulnerable people, one very small sliver of those vulnerable people is me.

There are many, many more people like me out there — young, old, robust and healthy, immunocompromised, and everywhere in between. The compelling and moral logic of social distancing buys all of us time. Time to get front-line health care workers masks, time to get more tests, time to isolate cases, and time to slow the rate of infections and subsequent hospitalizations so that should someone need care, there is care available.

I’m not writing this to incite fear, but to share the gravity of all of this for me personally. My bottom line is that I believe the bedrock of effectively fighting the worst-case scenario of coronavirus is through social distancing.

Throughout all of this, I keep on running and breathing (deeply) fresh air. That’s still the best preventative care for me. We are so lucky to continue to keep getting outside during this ... 6 feet apart.

Alli Harvey lives in Palmer and plays in Southcentral Alaska.