My Experience

I was having some difficulty breathing, my heart was healthy and lung x-rays clear, so my doctor sent me for an asthma test. I was brought into the breathing lab at the hospital and told to go inside this plexiglass booth which looked like a phone booth. I was relieved when the technician told me that we would be keeping the door open (it was only shut for a test of lung pressure, which I was not having). She gave me a clip for my nose and told me that I would be sucking some gas that if I had asthma, would trigger it slightly, and that we would be doing this with five increasing doses. If I had trouble breathing, we stopped and I had asthma, if I got through all five doses, I didn’t have asthma. So I breathed the gas through an open mask, no big deal, it didn’t taste or smell like anything, waited a minute for it to have any effect, and then I put another tube in my mouth and was told to exhale as forcefully and long as I could. A computer measured my lung resistance.

I sailed through the five doses, no problem, so I didn’t have asthma. I did have a little trouble breathing at the end, which the technician said was normal because a lot of people without asthma will still react slightly to the test gas, so she had me suck twice on an inhaler and all was good, I was finished. Total testing time was maybe 30 minutes, though they had me block out 1.5 hours (a good portion of which was spent in the waiting room).