‘Her Asthma Is Just Like a Job . . . 24 Hours a Day, Seven Days a Week’

Rochelle Hasson has worn a constant path to the emergency room. Her mother jokes that the 13-year-old must be allergic to holidays. One year she spent Easter, the Fourth of July, Halloween, Christmas and her birthday in the hospital.

The emergency room nurses at County-USC Medical Center have come to recognize her: “You back again, Rochelle?” they say.

Every morning at home in South-Central Los Angeles, she takes a whiff from five inhalers and swallows three pills, then at night she repeats virtually the same regimen. She carries her inhalers and a portable breathing machine, called a nebulizer, in a backpack everyplace she goes.

Her latest attack came when she smelled perfume at a movie theater. “I was breathing real hard and tried taking inhalers, but it didn’t work,” Rochelle said. “So the ambulance had to come get me. They told me if my mother hadn’t called the ambulance and got me to the hospital, I would have died.”

Rochelle’s asthma attacks, the first striking before she was a year old, are triggered by 21 allergies--to commonplace things such as chocolate, dogs, dust, wheat and milk. Her mother, Dorothy Easley, has stripped their apartment of virtually everything that can trigger an attack. She put plastic covers underneath the bed linen to ward off dust mites. She vacuums at least once a day, sometimes twice.

With the efforts--and the daily medications--Rochelle’s attacks are far less severe. Yet her mother is constantly on edge, listening in the dead of night for the telltale wheeze from her daughter’s room.

“Her asthma is just like a job,” sighs Easley, who relies on government-assisted health care. “A 24-hour job, 24 hours a day, seven days a week.”