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Getting a Flare-Up
Treatments can make him more hyper The only time his asthma really affects Jason is when it acts up. Otherwise, he can do basically almost everything everybody else can do. But if he's got a cold, or if he's eaten something he's not supposed to have eaten— because for him his asthma's mainly because of his allergies— his asthma acts up. Then he has to do the nebulizer treatments. They get him more hyper than he normally is, and then he tries to run around more, and he can't breathe, so it makes it hard. When Brian does get an attack, it scares him. It's very frightening. There are these billboards around our town that say “When I have an asthma attack I feel like a fish out of water.” I think that's a really good description of an attack. He gets terrified when he can't breathe. Probably the most difficult thing for him is that when an attack occurs, it's hard for him just to remain calm, to know that he's actually going to be okay, that he just needs his medicine. Brian has gotten calmer during flare-ups as time goes on. It's been I guess four years now since he was diagnosed with asthma, and he is calmer about it, but he does definitely need either me or his dad to be there and tell him it's going to be okay, to just relax and to take a breath of the Albuterol. We use a nebulizer; the inhaler doesn't really work for him because he panics and he won't take a breath out of an inhaler. So we do the nebulizer instead so that he gets something in, and as the something gets in, he calms down as he can start breathing again. My mother thinks Lucy's asthma is an emotional thing, that she triggers it herself. Sitting here thinking about it now, yeah, I think it could be true. She was all excited to have a baby-sitter she hasn't seen in a while stay with her when I left the house one morning, but by the time I got home five or six hours later, she was just like a totally different kid— totally drawn and wheezing. Also, there was one night this week my 20-year-old son came up to visit and I said to her, “I'm just going to walk Aaron outside and I'll be right back in five minutes.” I went downstairs, said good-bye to him, came back and by the time I got back to her room she was in an emotional state, she'd got herself all worked up and was wheezing. We took her to the hospital, and that night they had difficulty with her. They had to keep waking her up, her heart rate kept falling, her oxygen rate kept falling, and they had to keep waking her up and pounding her to get everything inside her again. That made me think she triggers it herself. My mom's always said it's an emotional thing. |
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Hospital Boston Department of Psychiatry. All Rights Reserved. The information on this website should not be taken as medical advice, which can only be given to you by your personal health care professional. Updated: June 5, 2007 |
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