Transcript
FATHER
As my son’s got older, it’s almost easier to recognise when an attack is starting, and that’s because he sees it coming himself. He’ll tell you that he’s struggling a little bit and so you go into a routine of – have you done your inhalers? When he’s having an attack, he can take up to ten puffs of a blue Ventolin inhaler. If that doesn’t have any effect on him, from experience he knows that either we will put him in the car, get him down to A&E. If it’s really a quite worrying one, if it’s quite bad, we’ve phoned ambulances before and he’s been taken into hospital in an ambulance with blue lights on, so it’s almost easier as he gets older, but no less worrying, obviously.
Going back to when he was quite young, you’d almost see patterns in his behaviour when was struggling with asthma. He used to display some signs or make noises almost, that we would think, ‘hang on a minute, he’s struggling a little bit’. He used to try and draw a breath in and he would almost hold his breath once it was in and then he would expel it and it made almost a grunting noise. So you’d see that, you’d hear that, and you’d sort of look at him and he’d be a little bit concerned, a little bit worried. When he was younger he didn’t sort of realise that he could be struggling a little bit, he didn’t make the connection as such, but as he’s got older, he stopped making the noise that he used to make but he recognised it coming on so he would actually say, ‘I need my inhaler.’
When my son was having an attack, the hardest thing to do was stay calm. If he saw that we were getting a little bit flustered or concerned that would have an effect on him. So I think if someone is in that position, is having an attack, remain calm. The worst thing you can do is get upset yourself because they’re just going to pick up on that. So when he was having an attack you’d just literally sit with him, talk to him, make sure he’s got his inhaler, make sure he’s got anything that might make him comfortable. He used to have a teddy bear; he just liked to hold the teddy bear when he was younger, so just making a pleasant as possible environment for him.
I think the point when you realise you are going to need proper medical assistance – when he was young you do tend to – Ventolin. If you saw that’s not going to work, you’d literally and immediately decide right, he needs to go, he needs to be in an ambulance or we need to rush him down to the hospital.
We’d been aware of the 111 service that we can phone to get advice, work out next steps, but, from experience, you basically know the symptoms your child is displaying – 111 service isn’t always going to be of a great benefit to you. It might – it might help the first couple of times it happens because you’re not going to want to bother the ambulance service. But, after a while, after getting to know your child’s symptoms, you phone 999 and I’ve done that a good couple of times. He has been rushed into hospital in an ambulance and straight into critical care a good three or four times, probably.
The time periods when your child is having an attack, they can vary because the severity of an attack is evident sometimes, sometimes it’s not. Once he’s not massively responsive to the Ventolin, you know pretty much straight away that he’s going to need to go in; he’s going to have to be ambulanced into hospital and get the nebulisers.
From a parent’s perspective it can be a scary, scary experience. And maybe the first couple of times it happens, you’re not entirely sure what it is, you may not even know the severity, the possible outcomes, what they can be. The more you live with it, as a parent and obviously the child living with it, you know it can be severe, you know that they can get into quite a lot of trouble pretty quickly. So if you recognise the signs, if you know the signs from experience, I’d – I wouldn’t hesitate to phone 999.
From a child’s experience, the first time it happens, it’s going to be scary. They’re not going to know what’s going on, but also, the more they have it, I think, when they have an attack, they know that the consequences can be quite bad. So the last time my son had an attack, he was on the verge of panic. He knew that he could, potentially, stop breathing, but by that stage, luckily, we were at the hospital, he was being nebulised, he was being given medication, but you could still see he was scared, he was absolutely petrified, actually.
I’ve got experiences of being in critical care with my son and, I’ve got to say, with the hospital that we’d been to – we’ve been to two different hospitals, actually, and they’ve been both absolutely brilliant with him, professional care all the way through, really.
The things the staff do can be really helpful from a parent’s perspective because they – they tell you what’s happening, they – they keep you calm, they talk to the child. As the child gets older if they are able to be talked to and explained to, they will do – they can instil a lot of confidence. Some have struggled to remain calm at times, but if they’ve called someone, I’m guessing a senior, they’ve immediately instilled a bit of confidence, telling us what they’ve given him, what the effect could be and basically saying ‘calm down, calm down, everything’s going to be okay’, and you get to the stage where you look at the monitor as well, you see the saturated oxygen, and when you see a certain number you think ‘blimey, that’s a bit low’, but they will say ‘don’t worry, don’t worry’; then you will see the saturated oxygen level creeping up and then what they’ve told you is basically right and, have a bit of faith in them, and, hopefully, the outcome is going to be a good outcome.
Communication is vital, really, because with an asthma attack there’s – there’s a lot of fear on both sides. There’s a fear in the child, there’s a fear in the parent, and as long as you get clear communication from your healthcare professional it can put you at ease, it can put the child at ease and that, it really is, key. If they can communicate clearly, concisely, accurately, you do feel a lot better about the care your child is getting.