Is this my asthma or something else?

[elliejjtiny]

Posted this in general health but it's quiet there so I'm copying and pasting it here for traffic.

I have had a cough for about a month. For the first 3 weeks or so I was coughing up green slime and feeling generally rotten but now it's just a mild chesty cough with an annoying tickly cough that keeps coming and going.

I've had asthma for 30 years and it was bad when I was a child/teen but it's been very mild for the past 15 years or so. When I started with this cough I upped my steroid inhaler dose as I usually do and I kept increasing the dose until I was taking the same dose that I was taking when I was a teenager (600 beclamethasone daily instead of the 100 I normally take these days). It has helped although I still end up needing 8-12 puffs of ventolin every day. Other things that have helped are hot drinks and breathing through my nose instead of my mouth.

I'm wondering if this is my asthma playing up all of a sudden, covid (unlikely as I haven't been anywhere and nobody in our house has any symptoms) or something else. The fact that nose breathing seems to help makes me wonder if I am having panic attacks.

I know I should go to the gp but I have ptsd so I try and avoid drs/hospitals unless my head is hanging off.

Sounds like you had a chest infection.

Ok, well purely on your past, you have asthma, you had green sputum a month ago, you're still not well.

Time to let a doctor do the diagnosing.

You'd have to deal with a lot more doctors/ hospital time if it tipped into pneumonia and need admitting. Sorry, I know you wanted someone to say "just drunk a cup of tea, and all will be well"... but you know that's no going to happen

Sounds like you need a course of antibiotics. Once the infection is treated you’ll be able to work out whether your asthma is playing up or not.

By the way in future if you do have a chest infection and asthma you mustn’t leave it 3 weeks before seeking help- generally doctors will give you a rescue park of oral steroids and antibiotics to keep at home to take at the first sign of an infection as it’s much harder to shift once it sets in if you have asthma.

I would go and get seen or have a phone consult if that is less distressing for you? I worked with a colleague complaining about her asthma suddenly being out of control and it did turn out she had had Covid (not too bad in itself got an antibody test as we work in care) but it had made her asthma flair up.
She got some stronger steroids and is much better. It may not be anything to do with Covid I just click that out there as it was odd she never had to use her ventolin and suddenly was puffing away on it! Don’t leave it asthma attacks are dangerous thing.

Thankyou everyone. You're right about the pneumonia thing, I was just hoping it would go away on it's own (stupid I know). I've got a telephone appointment with the gp today so hopefully she will be able to sort me out without me having to go into the surgery.

I must confess I've just spent 2 weeks trying to sort my own asthma, virus, testing, iso, more puffer. I've not had covid, but whatever it was, the asthma is a damn sight better since the GP double the steroids

Thankyou

GP has switched me from a brown inhaler with a blue one for emergencies to a pink inhaler which is a combination of a higher dose of the brown one and a slow release version of the blue one.