Curtis Odom 

Does anybody else ride with breathing disorders? I have bilateral vocal cord paralysis. A speech disability and a breathing disability. Above a certain effort which sets in very quickly I almost pass out.

shelbyfv

I'd suggest a recumbent trike so you can't fall off.

surveyor6

My breathing disorder is that one of my lungs collapsed a couple of times in my twenties. They fixed it with a thoracotomy pleurodesis. The damaged lung processes air very slowly.

alo

Think about an electric bike, so you don't need to over exert yourself.

zandoval 

I am new victim of pulmonary problems so I am learning as I go along. As a health care provider I have advised but now with my own problems it's more pointed. There are a few things you should do. One is to get an O2 Saturation monitoring device. That is a device that is going to measure your oxygen saturation in your blood. This will allow you to gauge how long you have before you are recovered.

For example if I climb a small hill my respirations are fast as well as my heart rate. A pulse oximeter will tell me how fast my heart is going and what my SaO2 is. I can stop and rest and wait for my heart rate to slow down and my SaO2 to increase. These things are all relative for each individual so I cannot tell you what numbers to look for. But, with an SaO2 device you can experiment and determine just how far you can normally go and how long to take for your recovery.

If you are getting to the point of passing out or loosing consciousness then really you should not be on the road at all... Sorry...

Edit: Getting back to your OP. If your breathing difficulty is a mechanical one, that is, collapse of the airway or paralysis of breathing ability, then you must determine exactly what is the precipitating factor. You need to do that by experimentation and observation. Certainly you should never ride alone.

10 Wheels

Get One:

Zacurate 500G OLED Fingertip Pulse Oximeters, SpO2 Blood Oxygen

63rickert

Late to the party. Hope good things have happened in past four months. What you want is a physiatrist. Spellcheck let me do it, that is spelled correctly. Also known as Physical Medicine & Rehabilitation. Also in the business of resolving complex issues that others have abandoned.

There are plenty of them in San Diego, get one you can work with who wants to work with you. They are not all created equal. My wife had a really bad one and her problem was never resolved. Years later she accompanied me on a visit to my sports orthopedist. Who had added physiatry accreditation to his honors. On my office visit he chatted with her and fixed a problem of five years standing in as many minutes. At no charge.

There are doctors who thrive on solving problems. Once when seeing my sports ortho he remarked that I always spoke of cycling as a great boon, universally beneficent. He had a waiting room full of patients who had hurt themselves on bikes. He suspected they were masochists prospecting for injuries. This led to him scheduling a series of appointments with me and a series of bike rides. He asked the best questions ever about cycling. He wanted to know how it worked and why I never got hurt on a bike. And he wanted to help his patients. And was not too proud to ask one of them.

A sports orthopedist would be a good option too. They are orthopedists who do not do surgery. Don’t have to be an athlete to go see them. Your condition involves plenty of bones, couldn’t not involve them. The big upfront recommendation for any sports orthopedist is that all the money in the profession goes to the surgeons. The guy who passes that up money because he thinks he can help people without a knife is likely a good guy. And they know the best physical therapists. Most PTs are pretty good, the best want to work with sports orthopedists. SOs are collegial with their PTs, work closely with them.

Good luck to you.

badrad

I have a similar problem, not in breathing but as a result of a couple heart attacks that has damaged my heart, my ejection fraction is around 32-35%. So what happens is that as I attempt to peddle hills, as my heart rate increases, blood is not being efficiently pumped and I wind up not getting oxygen and I will find myself getting dazed as I go past 150bpm. Although I am still peddling up the hill I am actually falling asleep as I bike.
I do have several steep hills around the home, and in order to even ride around my neighborhood, I will need to tackle these as part of any ride. So for my local rides I finally buckled and decided to get an ebike just for local rides - I will use zero the majority of ride, and where I start getting that dizzy feeling I will enable the motor to assist to keep my HR under control. The ebike was my wife's request, in that she said if I persist in biking around the neighborhood by myself, that last thing she wants is an emergency call about her husband collapsing going up the hill...
On group rides with friends I use my road bike, and they all know my condition and will try to arrange routes that they know should keep me below my bonking rate, and several of them will tagteam buddying with me to make sure I'm okay. So as it is now I usually only go on the occasional ride with them since I don't want to burden them, nor detract from their enjoyment for a more rigorous or challenging ride. It is what it is now.