where to go now ???

Hello my names amy and my 5 year old daughter is asthmatic and i am at my wits end with her and the doctors!!! She has been in and out of hospital since she was 2 and a half. In may she ended up in intensive care on various medication including iv sabutamol and various nebs was very scary!!! she had her follow up appointment which was in august . She was well between may and august so they just dishcharged her. She has been on pred every two weeks since just after her appointment till now!!! Her daily medication is ventolin, serevent and clenil 100 ,montelukast tabs and cerzeritine. She is constantly wheezy and coughing all night but every time i take her back to the docs its just more pred which only does the trick for 2 weeks at the most!!! I feel like we are hitting a brick wall surely there is more that can be done?? her attendance is only 62% at school and i do nothing but worry!!! Can any one suggest where i go from here thanks in advance xxxxxxx

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Hi, I'm new on here but had asthma all my life and my 6 year old son has had it for a few years as well as a number of heart defects so I guess we're used to the hospitals by now!

If she is struggling then I would ask your GP to refer you back to the hospital consultant, I live in Manchester and here we get referred to the North West lung centre where you are normally followed up for at least a year after an attack that puts you in hospital. I don't know where you live but speaking to your GP to find out if there is a similar service near you might be useful. Years ago I was getting wheezy for no particular reason and it started pretty suddenly, I got referred to the lung centre and straight away he suggested an allergy to the inhaler I was using because it had been changed from Ventolin branded to the generic salamol which apparently causes allergies in a number of people. Something so simple that was just unknown to most of the doctors I had seen before that.

It is just my opinion from my own experiences but personally I would be wary of giving your daughter prednisone so often, I understand it lowers your immune system which is how it stops the inflamation asthma causes, unfortunately by doing this I believe it is much easier to pick up coughs and virus' because the immune system is not working so well. I think with your daughter being 5 and being around all the winter bugs at school giving her pred so often is probably going to help her catch bugs more often which in turn will make the asthma worse. Might be worth asking your doctor about. I think finding a better inhaler regime would work better.

If you don't get anywhere with referrals or they are taking too long, present at A+E during the night if that is when she is ill. Doctors can only make a judgement and treat what they see at the time, so let them see her when she is ill. My son had pneumonia a few years back, the GP's, hospital consultants, cardiologists kept saying he was fine, just a bad chest infection but then I took him to A+E at 4am one night and when they did the chest x-ray they found atypical pneumonia and took us to ICU.

Good luck! It does get easier, we've always found managing the doctors harder than managing the asthma so once you get a treatment plan sorted (and an overnight bag always ready in the car!) it's pretty easy to deal with