I know about the asthma thing, I'm doing that at the moment myself. Thank you for sharing your experiences, freewill, it's a good question to ask one's self and think deeply about.

Do you have any stores that deliver. Here in the Maryland area, we have Peapod http://www.peapod.com/ which I could get at my old house but not here (this neighborhood isn't "good" enough or dense enough to get a goodly number of people signed up). But I loved that, they came right into the house with the bags of stuff (and wonderful, huge plastic bags with handles that were so useful for other purposes) and put them where I said (in front of the refrigerator, obviously )

Don't know if you can find anything you can use on Amazon's grocery department if you don't have a delivery service in your area. I order a few things from there but don't have the storage space for much and they seem to want to send larger amounts. Too, they don't have "fresh" items, just boxed, canned, frozen, etc.

I don't know about the friend that doesn't want anyone else to know about your illness? Seems obvious why you're not getting a whole lot of help there! Does your therapist or doctors have any ideas on how you can get more personalized, supportive help irl? I think I'd try to do something along bebop's ideas and see if I could get someone in person to show up and check on me and chafe me a bit like the old nursery nurses do in all the good English romance novels :-)