13 months old and just diagnosed...

Hi!

My son was diagnosed 2 days ago as being asthmatic after being hospitalised for breathing difficulties. He was wheezing heavily and it scared the life out of me.

My son is 13 months old - nearly - his 1st birthday was 4th September. He has always suffered with chest infections and wheezing, but it was never diagnosed as asthma before.

He has to take a brown 'preventer' inhalor morning and night, and a blue 'reliver' as needed. He takes these through a spacer. He hates it though and screams blue murder when he sees it coming out of the box!! He has a 3 year old sister and we are trying to make the spacer less scary, enrolling his sister to help us and letting him play with it - but he's so young we can't reason with him - or bribe him!!

Any tips?!?!

Thanks! xx

[yaf_user681_26410]

Hi butterfly123,

Have you tried putting his favourite cartoon character stickers on the spacer. Your daughter could play with it when it has been washed and pretend to use it herself.

the other suggestion I was given for my son was to use a polystyrene cup, draw round the mouthpiece of the inhaler and cut a hole in the base of it, then put that round his mouth and nose and puff the inhaler through it. Not so big and much softer than a hard plastic spacer but you do get alittle more waste inevitably.

All the best

Ange xx

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Hi Butterfly123

my son is 22 months so a bit older than your little fellow but we've tried a few things that seem to have helped:

I got a spare spacer and mask which we leave lying around and play with (yes, me, hubby, big bro age 3 and Jamie): make like elephants, put it on teddy, make funny noises through etc just pick it up and lark about

we call it Jamie's magic mask

I let him hold it when i puff and he puts his finger on the puffer too (maybe your little guy's a bit little yet for that)

in the beginning we made pretend spacers from empty loo rolls and larked around with those too making psssh ing noices like the puffer

big smiles all round at puffer time seem to help (you feel a bit mad sometimes but hey whatever it takes....)

Good luck.........hopefully something will click for you soon

X