Know the symptoms of an asthma attack
Early last fall, 21-year-old Jasmine Moroz caught what she thought was just a bad cold. Her family doctor prescribed penicillin to treat a respiratory infection. A few days later, Jasmine was resting at her home in Winnipeg when she started to have trouble breathing. She rushed to her doctor's office and sat in the waiting room, gasping for air.
"I couldn't get enough oxygen. I was breathing so hard that I started blacking out and ended up on the floor," she says.
Her doctor gave her Ventolin, a medicine that opens up bronchial tubes in the lungs, and sent her to the emergency at a nearby hospital. "They put me on oxygen and kept giving me Ventolin," says Jasmine. "My breathing got better, and after a few hours they released me. No one mentioned asthma."
Asthma triggers
Jasmine took a few days off from her job as an assistant manager at a restaurant, but her cold persisted. She spent Thanksgiving Sunday at a family gathering hosted by her grandmother.
"A few people were smoking in the house -- my grandmother, my aunt and my dad," she recalls. After she went to bed that night, the symptoms she'd experienced nine days earlier recurred. "My breathing kept getting worse. I would sleep 15 minutes, wake up and take another shot of Ventolin. That went on all night."
The next morning, Jasmine's mother drove her back to a busy emergency department. She was terrified because she had trouble breathing. "The feeling was awful, the worst sensation I've ever had in my whole life. It was like breathing through lungs the size of peas. You're constantly out of breath," says Jasmine, who was also shaking because she had inhaled so much of the drug. "You're supposed to take one or two puffs every four to six hours. I'd used about 180 puffs."
Treating severe asthma attacks
The emergency staff treated her with oxygen, the corticosteroid prednisone and more Ventolin. "It was stressful because I didn't know what was going on. Everybody was asking, 'Have you ever had asthma? Have you ever had eczema?'" Jasmine said she had developed eczema at 14; now she learned it was a risk factor associated with asthma.
"Everything started to make sense. I didn't want it to be asthma, but it wasn't totally out of the blue."
After six hours of treatment, Jasmine's breathing finally began to improve. She was hospitalized for two nights. Before leaving she met with an asthma educator, who taught her how to use her medications and monitor her symptoms. Jasmine paid a steep price as a result of a medical error and her own lack of curiosity about her condition. "I was very upset," she says. "The second attack could've been prevented if I'd been properly diagnosed the first time."
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