A few weeks ago I was at the end of my tether feeling tight chested pretty much all the time with a consultant telling me it was mostly in my head. A friend who works for a charity suggested I call Asthma UK, which I'd never really considered before.
The lady I spoke to was really nice and gave me a good chance to have a moan and a bit of a boo and get some stuff off my chest (as t'were). She then asked what I was on and noticed I was being prescribed serevent without a steroid inhaler, which is against NICE guidelines. She advised me to go back to the GP and challenge her on it.
Turns out my old consultant thought I was on seretide when he said it was ok to stop the brown inhaler over a year ago. When he wrote to my GP to tell her as much, she failed to spot that he'd written 'seretide' in the letter and didn't question the lack of steroid with serevent. The new consultant now reckons he thought I was on seretide too! I now feel like not a single one of those eejits bothered to listen to me. If they missed that, what else might they have missed?
Anyway, long story short, I'm now on seretide and feeling better than I have in ages. I even went for a swim last weekend and managed thirty lengths
I can highly recommend calling Asthma UK. Can't say the same for any of my doctors.