Ain't Easy Being Wheezy!

Current prednisolone dose: 25mg Current weight: 321.4lbs (-4.4lbs) Slightly late this week posting as I’ve been knocked out for a few days with a cold that immediately started to irritate my chest! While I’ve been lying around feeling rough and attempting to tweak things to avoid upping my steroids again/stay out of hospital it got me thinking about how I cope with my asthma - something I’m often asked by friends and family (spoiler alert: I don’t!). So, without further ado here are my personal tips that I’ve found help me cope with severe, unruly asthma! (Although most of these can be applied to all asthma!) 1. Have an action plan and know it well This really is so important! Every asthmatic, regardless of how mild or severe should have an action plan in place. It gives a guide on what symptoms to look out for, how you can increase your own medication (for example, increasing your preventer dose) at home and when you should seek further attention (either through your GP or at

Current prednisolone dose: 25mg!! Current weight: 325.8lbs (-3.8lbs!) Wooooo! So now that I'm actively trying to get down on my steroids I'm also going to try and properly lose some of the weight I've gained - rather than just maintaining, which was my aim during my 4 month xolair trial. Week 1 has seen success in both! Especially surprised I managed to lose any weight this week as last weekend saw me overindulge in the food department massively! I was helping out with some post-graduate medical exams which meant I got to go to the examiners dinner (extremely fancy food!!) and we were well supplied with snacks throughout the day (7:45 till 5:30) so I ate a lot of biscuits... I've also struggled quite a bit with fatigue from lowering my prednisolone dose this week so have spent a lot of it in bed feeling sorry for myself, which means, you guessed it! MORE SNACKS. But without a doubt the thing I'm most excited about is the success I've had in reducing

Current prednisolone dose: 35mg Current weight: 329.6lbs (oh dear...) So, we have the go ahead to try and start weaning down the steroids a bit! I’m going to try and post a weekly update with progress on the steroid dose and hopefully some weight loss! Some weeks will just be a random ramble, others may have a more definite topic - but hopefully it’ll keep me posting on here. I had my 16 week review of xolair on Monday and while it hasn’t massively reduced the number of admissions I’ve had, I produced a variety of graphs (which I will add on here later!) to try and show the difference it has made to me! Finally I persuaded my consultant that actually my admissions aren’t lasting as long, I’ve not required an HDU admission and day to day my peak flow is far more stable and I’m needing much less salbutamol. So the MDT has agreed to give me some time to try and get my steroids down to 25mg daily and then from that point we’ll give the xolair another 2 months. It’s always difficult

Enjoying yet another stay in the lovely hotel NHS and going a little stir crazy! One thing I notice a lot of people asking about in online support groups is what happens during a methacholine or histamine challenge test. I had one of these last summer and they sound very unpleasant so today I thought I'd write about my experience in the hope that it helps to put some worried minds at rest! What is the test? The methacholine and histamine tests are known as bronchial challenge tests. They're designed to irritate your airways and induce bronchoconstriction (which sounds awful!) which can then be measured. They're often used to try and confirm or rule out a diagnosis of asthma in people where it isn't so certain - for example if you have normal spirometry but still have asthma symptoms. Its carried out in hospital as an outpatient. These tests are known as "direct" challenge tests as they directly irritate the airway. There are some other tests known as

So, its been a few months since I wrote anything on here. Mainly because I spent most of July in hospital on HDU! I've had some pretty rubbish attacks over the last few years (particularly this year!) but this was something else. I felt pretty rubbish but my new house is literally a 5 minute walk from A&E so decided to walk myself over - cue turning up with sats in the 80s, a silent chest and general panic from all the staff! (oops). I don't remember much of it as I was so unwell but vaguely remember a respiratory consultant turning up from ITU there, being immediately started on IV aminophylline (which pretty much never happens in A&E here, they nearly always wait until you reach the respiratory hospital) and being constantly worked on for about 4/5 hours in resus. By the time they got me to the respiratory hospital many nebs later my chest was still extremely quiet so I went straight off to HDU. I started to improve over the next couple of days but then started to

I feel like it says something about my asthma when I'm excited that I only needed an overnight admission for the attack I had yesterday! I was on holiday in Lanzarote last week (very low pollen so absolute heaven for someone with severe allergic asthma!) which was brilliant, but unfortunately it did mean that any tolerance I had been building up to the grass pollen disappeared. Cue an almost instant deterioration in peak flow and symptoms on return to England. It steadily dropped over a few days from my personal best of 440 down to around 230 at which point I decided to bite the bullet and increase my prednisolone back up to 40mg from 30mg (that reducing regime is going really well...) in the hope of managing to get some sleep. The insomnia from the steroids may be annoying, but at least I could breath a bit better and cough less overnight! The next day things hadn't really improved so I rang the severe asthma nurses at my local (who now know me quite well) for some advice

I suppose the best place to start for something like this is the beginning! I've had asthma as long as I can remember, but it never really caused any issues for me as a child - I can only really remember having 2 or 3 courses of steroids up until about age 14 when I stopped inhalers completely, so it really was mild! Fast forward another few years to my third year of university and things went a little downhill to say the least! I spent the best part of a term ignoring (or not being very aware) of my worsening symptoms and although I did go to the GP to get a new inhaler I obviously didn't catch it in time and ended up with my housemates rushing me to A&E while we celebrated Christmas, in the middle of our exam period. It was particularly annoying because despite what various healthcare professionals have thought it was actually the least stressed I had been throughout university up until that point! I'm actually studying medicine at university too, which is good in