My son is 7, and suffers from what I think is cough variant asthma - as his only symptom is a cough.
He is on cetrizene, white atrovent inhaler, ventolin and QVAR 50 preventer.
On Saturday we had to visit out of hours, as his cough was bad (he had been sick twice from it, and hadn't slept much in the night). He was prescribed a 3 day course of steroids. He had the first set of tablets at 9am on Sat.
The coughing didn't improve and infact got worse, so we took him back to out of hours again this morning. He was prescribed antibiotics (although no sign of an infection), and put on the nebuliser for the first time. The nebuliser seemed to stop the coughing when he was on it. But as soon as we left the building and were discharged it got worse, and within 5 minutes was as bad as it was before he had been on it.
The steroids eventually seemed to kick in at about 3pm this afternoon - as the cough started to ease off. The cough has now nearly gone.
My question for you folks are these:
Should the steroids take that long to work (30 hours)?
If the coughing restarted almost straight away after the nebuliser, does this mean he wasn't given enough of the medication? Or could it mean that he hasn't got asthma (as the medication didn't seem to work)?
Your thought would be appreciated.
Jenny