I’ve had allergies and asthma for as long as I can remember. For most of my life, I’ve tried to find ways to get rid of them, to just breathe easier. It sounds simple; it’s not. When breathing is a struggle, day-to-day life can be tough to manage. Some people have even told me to just “live with it,” as if I should just accept constant breathing trouble as my lot in life. I wouldn’t. I refused to believe that there was nothing I could do to help ease my symptoms. Over the years I’ve probably tried every possible treatment out there, including the gimmicks and long-shots. Except for some medications – with their unpleasant side-effects – nothing worked. And then I discovered the Austin Air HealthMate.

There’s nothing extraordinary about my health history. Like most sufferers do, I developed asthma and allergies when I was a kid. Some of my earliest memories are of wheezing, gasping for breath, sitting for hours in the waiting rooms of a series of doctors. While other kids worried about scraped knees, I worried about being able to breathe. It constantly hung over me – wanting to breathe without a hacking cough, worrying about not being able to breathe at all. As you can imagine, these issues pretty much shaped my childhood.

My parents did everything they could. They took me to several highly-regarded specialists. The best such specialists could do was prescribe medications to treat my symptoms. Treating the symptoms didn’t do anything for the underlying condition – my asthma and allergies were just masked with an evolving cocktail of different kinds of drugs. When it came to the medication, the story was always the same: they helped reduce the symptoms, but didn’t bring me much relief since I then had to deal with the side-effects. The most significant – one that seems a nearly universal problem with respiratory medications – is grogginess.

Reducing my symptoms with medications meant that I traded one problem for another. I was wheezing, coughing, and hacking less, sure, but I was also constantly drowsy. Busy, demanding high school days are difficult enough without feet-dragging fatigue (or so I hear), but I had to deal with both. I’d get off the bus, trudge home, and promptly flop down onto the couch, so exhausted I had to sleep. It felt like being an old woman, even if I was really just a kid. My parents weren’t thrilled, but they felt like being able to breathe was the better option.

I quit the medications when I got older. I couldn’t take feeling like a zombie; I figured I’d try managing my symptoms in other ways. My main strategy was to keep everything as clean as possible. I became a bit of a cleaning fanatic. Through the years I’ve had several roommates, all of whom commented on how fastidious I was. Dusting, sweeping, mopping, vacuuming – I did it all. It became somewhat of an obsession, but only because I noticed that when everything was clean my symptoms lessened.

Of course, all that cleaning took up time. It got in the way of actually having a life. Sometimes I didn’t even want to leave my apartment – it was the one place I had control, that I knew was clean. Going outside meant dealing with pollen. Going to friends’ places meant being exposed to dust. My allergies and asthma were ruining my social life, my entire quality of life.

Around that time, a friend who also had respiratory issues called me up raving about a new HEPA purifier he’d found. Like me, he was always on the lookout for ways to improve symptoms. He’d started using the Austin Air HealthMate and said it was amazing. That was all I needed to hear; I went and got one as soon as I could find it.

I set up the purifier in my bedroom and it didn’t take long to see results. In fact, I was shocked at how quickly it started helping. The medical-grade HEPA purifier filtered out the irritants in the air, finally giving my lungs a break. My allergies and asthma got so much better, really quickly. Finally, something that truly made a difference for my health. I’m so thankful to have found the Austin Air HealthMate; I can’t recommend it highly enough. If it can help me, I truly believe it can be a godsend to others.

Megan F., San Francisco, CA

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