Happened to me
a few years ago, I woke up at 4am really wheezy, so reached for inhaler and took a puff. Didn't work. Then another. Didn't work. Then another... SHIT. Got up and phoned surgery's out of hours number, who advised me to call an ambulance. By now I was panicking, hardly able to breathe, the wait for the ambulance was terrifying, I thought I was going to die. Ambulance arrived after 15 mins, thank God, and they gave me oxygen and ventolin from a massive cylinder via a face mask. They were nice blokes, looked through my record collection and picked out (of all things!), Rumours by Fleetwood Mac (not even mine - belongs to my Dad - honest!) and made me put it on.

Sitting up breathing through a facemask at fuck o' clock in the morning with two strangers as 'Second Hand News' issued from my speakers was a slightly surreal experience it has to be said.

After half an hour I was OK and they left, I apologised for calling them out, but they waved away my apologies and said that if it ever happened again call an ambulance, it's what they're there for.

My asthma is normally under control and never bothers me, dunno why it flared up then, it hasn't since. Cross fingers.

Dktr S
(Dr Skagra glorious glargzhem, Fri 12 Mar 2010, 12:21, 1 reply)

.
This illustrates my point nicely about asthmatics not going to A&E until they think they're going to die if they don't. Since I've had asthma since I was 18 months I just don't take it as seriously as I should and feel like it's something I should just get over so I always feel like a bit of a hypochondriac when I do go to hospital with it. My sister also has asthma but wasn't in and out of hospital as a child like I was. One day when she was about 16 and I was about 14, I came home to find her breathing really badly and had been like that pretty much all day. I could tell straight away that she needed to go to hospital but she'd needed someone to tell her to go to the hospital because she thought she was overreacting, as it was she was in hospital for almost a week. The time that I ended up in intensive care I'd actually sat in bed for about an hour debating as to whether or not I was bad enough to warrant wasting the hospital's time. When I did eventually decide to get dressed and go to the hospital I'd been planning to go outside and flad a taxi rather than taking an ambulance out of circulation for half an hour. By the time I got dressed and got downstairs my breathing was so bad that my mother who was passed out on the sofa (it was Christmas Eve) was woken up by the sound of my breathing and immediately sobered up and called an ambulance. I went from debating with myself about whether I needed to go to the hospital to doctors thinking they might have to put me on a respirator in the space of about an hour. So any asthmatics out there, don't do the typical asthmatic thing of thinking you're probably not that bad and worrying about wasting their time in That night I actually had one of the doctors say that it was a nice change to be looking after someone who was actually sick rather than someone who had drunk themselves into oblivion and needed to have their stomach pumped or had injured themselves.
(mmm....beer, Fri 12 Mar 2010, 22:32, closed)