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Sweet victory: Jackie Joyner-Kersee triumphs over lifelong asthma
Jet, March 8, 2004
People with asthma can't set world sports records. They don't conquer the heptathlon, a grueling seven-event track and field stress fest that bests even the best athletes, let alone win nine consecutive heptathlons.
People with asthma don't win the prestigious Sullivan Award, bestowed on the most outstanding amateur athletes in the nation, they aren't voted the Associated Press Female Athlete of the Year and they certainly don't become the most decorated female competitors in U.S. Olympic track and field history with six medals.
That's what Jackie Joyner-Kersee believed. And since Jackie had accomplished all those feats, there was no way she could have asthma. No way at all.
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"If you're an athlete, that's the last thing you want to be--labeled as having any kind of disease," Jackie admits to JET. "People look at people with asthma like they're weak. Like something is wrong with them. You don't want to be the one who's always bent over on your knees, unable to breathe."
Jackie was first diagnosed with asthma, a chronic lung disease that causes inflammation and constriction of the airways, as an 18-year-old freshman at the University of California-Los Angeles (UCLA). But the stigma of weakness that surrounds asthma, which affects more than 3 million Blacks, kept Jackie in denial about her disease for years. Stigma and ignorance.
"I just thought that when I couldn't breathe, I was out of shape," informs Jackie, one of four siblings born in East St. Louis, IL. Her breathing troubles, which began in childhood, had been misdiagnosed as bronchitis and mononucleosis. "They said you couldn't have asthma and do all the things I was doing, running and jumping."
Not even her family understood the gravity of her shortness of breath and wheezing spells.
"When I was younger, my mom would tell me 'You been playing too hard. Go sit in that corner and calm down," recalls Jackie, laughing at the memory.
Even after the official diagnosis her first year of college, Jackie failed to take her asthma seriously. She was too busy becoming a star athlete. And too stubborn. To admit she had asthma was to admit defeat.
"I said, 'It ain't no way I got asthma.' So I didn't take any of the medicine, I didn't do anything I was supposed to be doing to get my asthma under control."
Since Jackie refused to control her asthma, it began to control her life. Freshly cut grass near the track where she did her morning practice runs triggered her asthma attacks. Pushing herself to run beyond her limits triggered attacks.
"There was never a time when I couldn't run. But when we had to do mile time trials and I couldn't do a mile, it messed with me mentally. I tried to force myself to run even while my chest was getting tight. I'm thinking 'I'm never going to reach my goal because I can't do the workout. My mindset was that I was quitting on myself."
Even her coach, Bob Kersee, whom Jackie later married, couldn't persuade her to accept the truth.
After years of taking chances with her health, Jackie finally realized that she would never reach her fullest potential as an athlete until she overcame her largest hurdle.
"I came to grips with asthma because asthma was getting the best of me," she reveals. "My biggest fear was that I would have an attack in a competition, and I didn't want that to happen. And that was the only obstacle that could beat me. So I stopped looking at the doctor as an enemy and started respecting my doctor's knowledge and using him as a coach to help me. That's when I really started educating myself. I realized I could die from asthma."
Although Jackie retired as an athlete in 1998, she says conquering her asthma remains a lifelong competition.
"I still have to accept that I'm an asthmatic," she says. "That's hard at times, because when you're living as fully as I'm living, and taking you're medicine, you think you don't have it anymore. But as soon as you stop taking the medicine, it comes back."
These days, Jackie openly talks about the disease that she once fought so hard to hide. And she wants Blacks to know that asthma doesn't have to ruin your life.
"Don't let asthma control you; you control your asthma," she says. "And never give up on yourself."
For information about asthma, contact Asthma Action Network (800-377-9575 or www.asthmaactionamerica.org) or the American Lung Association (www.lungusa.org).
COPYRIGHT 2004 Johnson Publishing Co.
COPYRIGHT 2008 Gale, Cengage Learning
