So I suffered with asthma from about the age of 13 until several years ago when the symptoms just disappeared, I stopped attending check ups and over time never needed to use an inhaler again.
I recently started C25K (againš¤£) and from the very first run my chest felt tight. I've also suffered with hay fever this year for the first time ever.
I kind of ignored the tight chest thinking I was just incredibly unfit! As the runs got a bit longer I felt worse - tight chest while running and then wheezing a bit and coughing afterwards.
Stupidly I still didn't get it checked.
Then on Saturday I went out to run with my best friend. We had to run for 9 minutes I think, which is quite a lot for me.
About 6/7 mins I was getting the familiar tight chest feeling but pushed on. All of a sudden I just couldn't breathe. At all. I was literally gasping for air and my chest/throat felt like they were on fire.
I instantly knew it was an asthma attack and I was terrified. Knowing I'd got no inhaler was without doubt the most frightening thing I've ever felt.
Thank god my best friend has a little boy with quite bad asthma. She recognised what it was straight away and thankfully had one of his inhalers in her car. How I got back to the car I'll never know. I was panicking so much which was making it worse. I was a total crying, wheezing, snotty mess.
She had a spacer for the inhaler too thank goodness, I'm not sure I could have coordinated taking it myself. After 10 puffs I felt loads better, I could feel it work almost immediately.
For the rest of the day I was ok but had a real ache in my chest.
I managed to get through to the gp today and after a check up, and a telling off, I've now been given a seretide inhaler as well as ventolin with strict instructions to go back in 2 weeks to be checked, or before if I'm still needing ventolin regularly.
I guess asthma never really goes away, I've learnt that the hard way this weekend!