Question:
This is exactly why I fuss at friends who have mild asthma. If you've
never had a severe attack, you just don't realize how fast things can
go sour and how fast you can die.
Answer:
Sometimes, even if you have had a serious attack, you don't realize how
serious it is. I had a number of severe asthma attacks when I was
younger, but I was really too young to realize that it was a Big Deal.
I didn't know that they don't put everyone in an oxygen tent when
they're in the hospital. Now that I've read about people dying from
asthma, I realize in retrospect how seious my asthma was, and what my
poor parents must have been going through. They promised me I'd outgrow it, but puberty has certainly come and
gone, and I'm still asthmatic. It's not as severe as it was, but I
still suffer from colds and the flu more than most people, and am far
more likely to have a head cold settle in my chest, to incubate into
some sort of infection. Flu shots have helped, as well as learning to
deal with colds when they start.
I take my inhaler with me on all rides, but of course yesterday when I
had a particularly hard lesson and actually needed it (I don't always,
depending on level of exhertion and amount of warm up), it was in the
car.
Out of curiosity, does anyone else get an itchy chin when they start to
get short of breath? My husband can tell when I need my inhaler before
I do, because I start absent-mindedly scratching my chin.
In retrospect, I realize my night anxieties as a teenager were
actually asthma attacks caused by sleeping on my granny's old feather
bed. But I didn't realize it and my family didn't want to admit to my
having asthma. The first attack I could pinpoint as asthma per se was
when I was 13--hot spring day, muggy with bad air pollution. The PE
teacher was pushing us hard in track and field, and afterwards I had a
bad asthma attack. Scary--but untreated for many years, until I
reached adulthood and didn't have the baggage my parents had
(remember, this was back in the days when asthma was considered to be
a psychological condition and Meant Parents Were Bad People--and my
mother was a working mom with enough guilt already). For older kids (I think they're saying over 12) and adults ask your Dr
about Accolate. It's the first drug out there that actually treats
some of the causes of asthma, rather than treating the symptoms. Accolate is a Leukotrine (sp?) inhibitor. I'm probably going to get
some of this wrong, but the in asthmatics there seems to be high
levels of leukotrines in the lungs which causes mucus and can
contribute to airway constriction. Accolate, keeps the leukotrine
levels low, thereby making it harder to get to the point where you
have an attack.
Accolate is a pill that you take everyday, about every 12 hours. The
only difficult part is you have to "schedule" it, because it needs to
be take on an empty stomach (1 hour before, or 2-3 hours after
eating).
Now it takes a direct confrontation with a known trigger (downwind of
a smoker, face full of dust, etc) to put me into an attack. Knock on
wood, I've never had a bad enough attack that I've had to go to the
emergency room.
