Doctors told Donna Cypert’s parents there was nothing else they could do for their little girl.

Forty years ago, there were fewer treatment options for asthma.

DRC/Barron Ludlum

Little Elm resident Donna Cypert holds a 1965 photo of her class at the Sahuaro School in Tucson, Ariz. The residential school operated in the 1960s for children with untreatable asthma. A group of former classmates will reunite later this month.

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She’d developed the disorder as a baby. At age 10, she was getting weaker with each attack — and it didn’t take much to trigger the next one.

Every fall, after the harvest, dust and particulate from cotton gins swirled around Munday, the tiny Knox County town where Donna and her family lived.

“The gin smoke was terrible,” Cypert said, adding that she was allergic to the grasses and mesquite that grew on those high plains, too.

Asthma is a complex disorder that obstructs the airways in the lung, making it difficult to breathe. Whether triggered by stress or airborne irritants, the constriction wrought by an acute attack can be fatal.

With her treatment deemed a medical failure, Cypert’s parents took a bold step in 1965. They enrolled their daughter at the Sahuaro School in Arizona.

Doctors and others affiliated with the program opened the $1 million residential facility high in the mountains above Tucson in 1964 after successfully treating elementary-age students with untreatable asthma for a decade in that city.

Cypert, 54, who now lives in Little Elm, said living at Sahuaro helped her get well.

The school had a regimented program, with a strict schedule of schooling and exercise alongside medical care in the clean mountain air. School lessons continued, even when students were in the infirmary.

Most students stayed for about two years, Cypert said, and went back home healthy, or at least stronger. She lived at Sahuaro until she was 12.

But leaving friends and family behind to live at the school was traumatic.

“I had a pretty hard time adjusting,” Cypert said.

The dorms had house mothers, and a social worker helped the students adjust to life away from home.

Even though Munday residents gave her a red-carpet homecoming, she and the rest of her family had a hard time living together again. The counseling they needed to help them through all the changes wasn’t there, she said.

“I was two years older,” Cypert said. “And my family had adjusted to life without me.”

Her asthma returned, as bad as ever, shortly after returning home. And she had been ripped from her social support again — this time, all the friends she’d made at the Sahuaro School.

From age 18 to 40, she was asthma-free, although she can’t explain why. It began to creep back up on her a decade ago.

“I was getting very short-winded, and realized it was back,” Cypert said, adding that new medication has kept it under control for 10 years now.

Cypert said her parents felt bad about sending her to Sahuaro. She said she wasn’t sure why, because over the years, she had come to understand why her parents felt they had no choice.

She never forgot her Sahuaro friends. She knew about one student who died from an asthma attack not long after returning home. She remained pen pals with another friend through the years. She wondered how others were doing.

In February, while answering a question on a quilting blog, a reader recognized her from Sahuaro School and steered her toward a few other “alumni” online.

Brooklyn, N.Y., resident Steve Bonilla said he had registered on Classmates.com hoping to find others who’d lived there. He’d kept a low profile at first, hoping primarily that he would find his best friend from school. Eventually, he did, and that friend suggested a reunion.

After that, things mushroomed. Bonilla and others searched for classmates on various reunion Web sites until they found between 30 and 40 people. Some had died. Others, for whatever reason, weren’t ready to be a part of the fun.

But many have been glad to find each other, and the old friendships seem to have a particularly deep bond, Bonilla said.

“I’ve never been to my high school class reunion,” Bonilla said.

The group is planning a reunion in Tucson from July 16 to 19. Although the Sahuaro School closed in 1969, the former students will be able to tour the facility, courtesy of those who now run a police training center there, Cypert said. They will also tour the Arizona Respiratory Center at the University of Arizona.

Cypert is unsure how many people attended the Sahuaro School those five years, since there was room for 72 students to live there at any one time.

But she’s excited that the acceptance and concern and love for each other, fostered 40 years ago in friendship, has remained after all these years.

“Perhaps we’re all at that stage of life,” Cypert said. “How many of us had each other on their minds?”

PEGGY HEINKEL-WOLFE can be reached at 940-566-6881. Her e-mail address is pheinkel-wolfe@dentonrc.com .