What doctors, nurses, patients and their families have to be acutely aware of is that asthma can – and DOES – kill
Hundreds of asthma sufferers are dying needlessly each year because of poor medical care .
The Royal College of Physicians conducted an in-depth review of asthma-linked deaths and found that guidelines were being neglected and there were errors in treatment of almost all the children who died from the condition.
This isn’t news to me – my daughter Gracie could so easily have been one of those children.
After a bout of pneumonia as a baby, Gracie was diagnosed with asthma at the age of two.
We were given the standard blue inhaler to relieve her symptoms, and the brown inhaler which was supposed to be prevent them.
But the medication didn’t really do much good. Every time Gracie got a cold, she struggled to breathe. She would cough so much in her sleep that it would make her vomit.
I took to sleeping on her bedroom floor watching her chest rise and fall to check that she was still breathing in the night.
The worry of watching my poorly toddler gasp for breath throughout the night will never leave me.
She was hospitalised several times, and each time she was given steroids to bring the attack under control. Then we were sent home with the same medication we had had before.
We just thought that that was what asthma meant – our daughter would be in and out of hospital and we had to watch her like a hawk every time she caught a virus.
But her condition took a much more sinister turn whilst we were on holiday in Spain. Gracie ate a nut and immediately started to gasp for breath. Her lips turned blue and she began to vomit. The back of her throat was closing – I knew she was having a severe allergic reaction despite eating nuts in the past with no problem.
We dialled 999 and Gracie was rushed by ambulance to the nearest hospital. I had to sit outside the emergency room listening to my daughter’s screams as medics literally pinned her down and injected her with adrenaline to save her life.
On our return home Gracie was referred to a specialist. He was outraged. He told us that the only reason Gracie had suffered such a severe allergic reaction was because her asthma was so poorly controlled.
He said that Gracie’s regular hospital admissions which we had started to take for granted, were totally unacceptable.
And he said that our daughter had been prescribed a relatively cheap asthma inhaler – rather than a more expensive one which could have prevented her symptoms much more effectively.
He immediately changed her medication, and four years on she has not suffered a single asthma attack since.
She plays football, netball, rounders and is in the school cross-country team. Not bad for a little girl who couldn’t get through winter without being admitted to hospital struggling to breathe.
The sad thing is, Gracie’s story is not unusual. What doctors, nurses, patients and their families have to be acutely aware of is that asthma can and does kill.
It is vital that asthma sufferers are given the correct medication to prevent and relieve their symptoms, even if that costs a few more pounds each year. It literally makes the difference between life and death.
