Breathe... Review on Health Care for Asthma

My son was ten weeks old when he developed severe eczema all over his body and head, but fortunately not his face. At age 18 months we did a house-swap with a family who owned a dog. The first morning there my son began to cough and choke and bring up long strings of phlegm. I was concerned but not overly worried and lay him downwards along my legs and patted his back. Luckily I was able to get in to see a local doctor without too much difficulty.

I was amazed when the doctor diagnosed asthma surely not? It must be just a bad cold? We were prescribed ventolin syrup and sent away. The rest of our week?s holiday was spent with little sleep and a lot of wheezing and coughing. we did find that my son was better when he was out in the fresh air and although the whole house smelled very strongly of?dog? it was a long time before I realised that my son had an allergy to dogs, perhaps because we had a cat at home and he had never had asthma before and I assumed that one would be allergic to fur in general.

When we got home the asthma cleared up but in a couple of months it was back, this time with a vengeance. Each month my son had a bad attack. Sadly one of the doctors in our local practice was not as sympathetic as I could have wished. I dreaded him being on call. Every attack followed the same pattern. First my son would have a sniffly cold and then within a day or two, always late evening, just when you really don?t want to have to harass a doctor his breathing would suddenly worsen, his chest labour with a rattling noise and he would begin to get a blue tinge round his lips. Then, it would be a trip to the hospital by ambulance, as we didn?t have a car.

If I was lucky we would get a sympathetic doctor who would come and give my son some Prednesol(steroid) tablets and a session with the practice Nebuliser(a very loud machine that pumps aerated medicine to a mask) and then be understanding when we had to call back again an hour or so later when my son?s condition worsened.

The asthma attacks would happen with such regularity that I took to keeping a bag packed ready for hospital visits. As each stay was on average three days the bag had to contain changes of clothes for me and entertainments for the both of us, if you do have to visit a hospital regularly I can recommend clean clothes, a favourite toy, books and drawing materials as many hospitals have toys only available during the day. I have found hospitals vary greatly in how they deal with children as patients.

Luckily we were able to use Bury St Edmund?s hospital and this was such a different experience. All the staff were pleasant and helpful; we were allowed to fill forms in quietly while treatment was already being started, as opposed to Addenbrookes where they wanted everything filled in before they would look at my son even while he was turning blue. Even on the occasion that we had hurtled along by ambulance with all the lights flashing and ended up one stage removed from intensive care was not as traumatic as a lower grade attack at Addenbrookes. The Norfolk and Norwich and Worksop General are both good hospitals and we treated very well by both, Worksop even having a selection of videos for tired parents to watch!

As the years progressed our lives revolved around the peak flow meter) to measure his breathing) and inhalers. As with most asthmatics my son had a blue inhaler for relief and a brown one for prevention. Initially he used a spacer, a device shaped like a lemonade bottle that catches the medicine from the inhaler so he can breathe it in, in more than one co-ordinated puff. Unfortunately the brown inhaler with Becotide gave my son bad headaches so we began a search for alternative remedies.

When my son was nine months old we had found a homeopathic practitioner who helped him recover from his food allergies, so naturally we returned to her for help with the asthma. Although using homeopathy reduced my son?s reactions to his food intolerances drastically, it did not help so well with the asthma, until we tried pulsatilla. I was very lucky to have found a more sympathetic GP who discovered we could get this homeopathic remedy on prescription. Pulsatilla does not heal or cure asthma, but we found that it reduced the viscosity of the phlegm, basically making it runnier so that the tightness in the chest was not so bad.

Gradually over the years the asthma has become less and less and although inhalers are still stored strategically about various relatives houses we have been lucky to rarely need them, usually only in autumn on foggy days and sometimes in hayfever season. Oh yes, he had hayfever too! The last bad attack that required hospitalisation was when he was five. Now he is a strapping sixteen year old and the only lasting problem we have had is a slightly stooping back from years of leaning over to help himself breathe.

The most important thing I found when he had attacks was to keep calm myself and help him keep calm as any stress just made breathing more difficult. We also found that milk and dairy products made him wheeze even when he didn?t have a cold, so over the first few years of his life I became quite an expert on diets, homeopathy and alternative health in general!

My son became so used to asthma as part of his life that when he started nursery and a child was absent he just assumed they had asthma. When he was admitted to hospital later for a routine operation as soon as he woke up he knew exactly where he was and was off to the nurses? station to ask for toast, while the other children where waking disoriented and distressed. So I guess every cloud can have a silver lining if you know where to look!

If anyone who has a young child diagnosed with asthma I can recommend finding support groups and societies and definitely looking into alternative therapies that will work in conjunction with conventional treatment. As I said homeopathy was of limited help, but it did ease things just enough for them to bearable