It's been a little while now since I did a Diary of a Spoonie blog post but everything that has happened recently, it's about time that I do another one. If you haven't been following my social media, I recently had to spend a week in hospital due to having an exacerbation of my severe asthma which being a nurse you can imagine how hard that was for me but I thought I'd share a little bit about it with you all.
It all started 3 weeks ago on a Tuesday when in the afternoon, I started getting a sore throat on one side whilst in work in the afternoon. When I then finished work that evening I was feeling exhausted and like the beginning stages of a cold so I decided to get an early night and be well rested for work the next day. By the next morning, I had gone from feeling a little under the weather to being full on sick, I felt absolutely awful and I knew that it had hit my chest because my breathing became difficult and my peak flow had dropped by 100 so I had to call in sick and basically spent that day in bed, either sleeping or watching grey's anatomy. The next day I was supposed to have breathing tests with my respiratory team at the hospital and I woke up feeling even worse and when I checked my peak flow after my inhalers, it had dropped to the level that I have to start my home pack of steroids and I then had to ring and cancel my breathing tests as they can't be done until I've been free of oral steroids for 6 weeks.
Unfortunately this is where it all went downhill, that afternoon I slowly walked up the stairs to get my notebook ready for my CBT session and that was honestly all it took and I went into a full blown asthma attack. Ironically because I'd started my oral steroids, I have to have a same date appointment with my GP so I was supposed to see them just after 5pm and the asthma attack happened at 3.30pm. I ended up using 8 puffs of my salbutamol with my spacer which did absolutely nothing so I decided to go to my GP practice early and see if a nebuliser there would settle it. Thankfully I have two best friends who are like family that live a 5 minute drive away and they kindly dropped everything to drive me to the GP because I was physically didn't feel safe to walk the 5 minute walk. I did get a funny receptionist who tried to tell me that the practice did have a nebuliser but as soon as I mentioned that they did because I'd had one at the practice before, I was being taken back to a private treatment room to have a nebuliser from the nurse whilst the GP finished up with his patient. Unfortunately I ended up having two nebulisers which didn't do anything so my GP decided it was time to send me to the hospital and rang an ambulance. However 2 hours later, we were still being told that it was going to be at least 45 minutes before it came and my GP decided that I couldn't wait so asked that my friend drove me 10-15 minutes up the road to the A&E and to keep a close eye on me during the transfer.
When I got there I had to be physically helped by Kirstie to walk into the A&E department (I refused multiple times to get in a wheelchair and was determined to walk in and yes I am an idiot). After we checked in and walked into the waiting room, the amount of people that stared at me was unnerving, if you haven't seen an asthma attack, they're not exactly a subtle experience. I was stood there literally clinging to Kirstie cause I kept feeling like I was going to pass out, luckily an older guy kindly offered me his seat and within 2-3 minutes, I was taken back to triage. I had a quick assessment from the nurse then one of the consultants came into my triage room and decided that I needed to go straight into a bed and have nebulisers. They were in the process of doing a discharge to the ward and then were going to move me to a bed so they sat me in some chairs in the middle whilst we waited for the bed to be ready. At this point Kirstie kindly went home and picked up Steph (I honestly don't know what I'd do without these two during this time and they made me laugh and keep me calm during this. I'm so appreciative of Steph during my time in A&E). As they both walked in, my asthma attack suddenly worsened again and there was a sudden hustle to get me into a bed, over to a bed space and then suddenly there was a crowd of people around me putting monitoring on, getting me on back to back nebulisers, putting a cannula in my arm and taking bloods then I had the lovely task of an arterial blood gas taken (these are the most torturous thing about having breathing problems because they are so incredibly painful to have done and the first one was unsuccessful so I ended up having to have multiple). I ended up needed IV infusions to help settle my asthma attack and unfortunately I ended up being admitted to the respiratory ward where my specialist team are located and won myself a 7 day stay and wasn't allowed to go home until I'd been nebuliser-free for 24 hours.
I've been a nurse for 7 years now and being on the other side of things in the hospital is not a nice thing and I noticed that it made my anxiety worse cause I had a loss of control. Although I didn't mention it (something most nurses do if they're ever in hospital), everyone that cared for me kept coming up to me either asking or saying that I was a nurse. On the ward I ended up needing more IV infusions to settle things properly before I was able to make better moves towards being nebuliser-free. Following a serious asthma attack you end up with the worst fatigue, muscular pain, and the tiniest of things feel like the heaviest tasks so for the last two weeks following being discharged I've been trying to rest and recover and over the last couple of days I've been trying to start rebuilding my stamina levels and get ready to go back to work which hasn't been as successful as I wanted to go back next week and I've needed a several hour nap every afternoon for the last 2 weeks. When I saw my respiratory team at clinic this week, they advised that I'm not ready to return to work and I needed another week before returning and I was still looking at another 2-4 weeks before I'm back to my usual self and can return back to exercise and swimming. I did also see my chest physio who gave me additional exercises to try and help my chest and they are also in the process of getting me authorised for a special device which helps to prevent my airways from collapsing and that we can combine with my breathing exercises to help my chest.
Over the last couple of months I've been having more and more 'mini' asthma attacks where I've been able to control them with my salbutamol inhaler and my spacer. It was very annoying because my respiratory team wanted me to have further breathing tests because of the deterioration and the step up in my inhaler regimes before starting biologic treatments and that's now been put on hold. I usually don't really consider myself as someone who has disabilities but it's times like this that really make me aware of these disabilities and make my realise how dangerous some of them came be. It's something that I try not to think about because it does make my anxiety worse when I think about it.
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