Asthma PSA

When you think of an asthma attack, you think of not being able to breathe and needing a rescue inhaler. Or you think of wheezing. I was educated yesterday and wanted to share.

A little history first...Landon had RSV at 6 months old. After that, he would wheeze any time he'd get sick and we'd have to give him breathing treatments of Albuterol with a nebulizer. They told us that he had RAD (Reactive Airway Disease), which is basically asthma in little kids who are too young to officially diagnose as asthmatic. He was on Singulair for preventative measures as well, but we still had to give him many rounds of breathing treatments for wheezing when sick. We ended up in the ER one night when he was 3 as he wasn't responding quickly enough to a breathing treatment and things were getting awfully scary.

The past few years have been better for him. He'd wheeze a tiny bit when sick and treatments would knock it out within a few days. After a long stint of no issues, we were able to wean him off of the Singulair. I don't think we've done a breathing treatment on him in the past year.

He had the flu back in December, got better, then started with a cough in January. And he's been hacking ever since. I thought I'd wait it out a little as I know coughs can linger FOREVER. He was coughing incessantly, around the clock. I started him on his allergy medicine that he has to take seasonally to knock out throat clearing and that didn't help, so it wasn't allergies. I thought maybe he had developed pneumonia like I had.

I took him to the doctor yesterday, after about 5 weeks of coughing. The doctor could hear a slight wheeze when listening to him with a stethoscope, although you couldn't audibly hear it. I found out that in his charts he is officially considered an asthma sufferer (kind of wish I had been told this before!). And this coughing is from his asthma. Asthma doesn't always present itself as wheezing or gasping for air, and often goes undiagnosed because people don't associate coughing with asthma. They gave him a breathing treatment with a mixture of Albuterol and Pulmicort in the office and it helped. He has been prescribed breathing treatments morning and night for a week, as well as starting his Singulair back up temporarily. If I don't see a significant improvement in a few days, then I'll need to add an extra Albuterol treatment in the middle of the night. If he has another recurrence soon, we'll meet to discuss putting him back on a daily preventative medicine like Singulair or an inhaler. He was perhaps "growing out of it" but the flu set him back. He still may grow out of this illness-induced asthma (did you know that asthma can be triggered by many different things like allergies, exercise, respiratory illnesses, etc.?) or he may be a sufferer the rest of his life. After my education by the pediatrician yesterday, if he starts coughing in the future, I will be able to recognize this as asthma and can begin his breathing treatments quickly.

I am hoping this PSA may help someone out there. But obviously, talk with your doctor as I am not a MD. Just a mom. Trying to figure this stuff out. Godspeed, mamas.