My son is 10 years old and it took a while to diagnose him with asthma. In fact, what he has is of a different sort. It’s called a cough variant asthma meaning his asthma crops up only when he gets a cough or cold. He was prone to get croup from October to April almost every year and this would occur 6-8 times. He would be put on steroids and sometimes on antibiotics and also would have to be hospitalized at times. He had a sinus infection which would not go away inspite of po and Iv antibiotics and so he had to have sinus reconstruction surgery at the age of 8. This really helped a lot together with Advair. In his healthy phases, he has to take Advair 250 and during his flare up’s he has to increase it to 500. This is helpful when he has a cold and his peak flow drops. I realized later on that at the first signs of a cough I had to increase the Advair dosage for him to get better quickly. So I stopped waiting for his peak flow to drop. Recently he had a bad attack of croup, had a temperature and his peak flow was as low as 200 definitely in the red zone. I had to take him to the ER where they started him on a course of prednisone. This had a good effect on his croup but on the final day of steroids, he was still wheezing badly. He’s had to battle with this condition before and the strategy followed by the doctors is to wait for another 10-14 days to see if it’ll clear up and if he can’t handle it and shows signs of breathlessness and fatigue they put him on antibiotics and steroids at times. Does anyone in similar situations have any suggestions for him?
