I have had adult onset asthma for over 15 years. It is limited to spring-time allergies and the occasional seasonal bronchial virus. I have never felt that is was a danger to me and have always taken the correct medications to keep it under control when the situation calls for it; in the springtime I take various allergy medications and daily asthma medications and when I pick up a chest cold I use my albuterol inhaler or my nebulizer with albuterol if it is really bad. MY doctor even provides me with prednisone to keep on hand since we a 30 minutes from any hospital. With the exception of the very first attack, I have never had an occasional were I felt like I was anxious or worried about my asthma.

This Saturday I had been outside all day. My family and I belong to a horse club that provided a color guard for a funeral. All week my husband (who also has asthma) and I had been a bit bothered by our asthma. So I had been on my Advair Discus for over 6 days to keep my airways clear. But on Friday and Saturday I had needed my Inhaler 4or 5 times each day. During the week I had also felt a bit "drippy" in my bronchioles. I feel that this sounds weird but I don't know another way to describe it. Just drippy enough to need to clear - but nothing that I could cough up. Anyways, on our way home about 4pm I notice that my lungs were getting to point of reduced capacity. This often happens to me - I don't necessarily get wheezy - I get reduced lung capacity. When ever I breath out fully (anytime of the year) I sound like a goose honking. It is much worse when I have a cold or allergy flair up and often will be accompanied by wheezing ,but not all the time. So I just focused on emptying my lungs completely and when we got home I went and rested. When my husband came in from unloading the horses and such, I asked for help getting a breathing treatment started because I noticed I was getting very short of breath, no matter how often I emptied my lungs, I couldn't get good clean full lung capacity back. The next few hours are pretty much of a blur for me. Very slowly my lung capacity diminished and my breathing became more and more shallow - but no wheezing. We tried 2 and 1/2 more breathing treatments and they did not work at all. This has NEVER happened. In all my time of using a nebulizer (and I hate as it makes me VERY, VERY jittery) it has always at least helped enough to make me feel a bit better. This time the lungs continued their slow closing down at EXACTLY the same pace and by 8pm and during the 3rd breathing treatment I told him to call 911, I could get barely any in and barely any air out and was breathing very, very, very fast to feel oxygenated. I also could not sit up without feeling very dizzy.

The paramedics arrived and hooked me up to oxygen immediately, they listened to my heart and lungs. They loaded me in the ambulance and after a total of about 10 minutes probably I could slow my breathing down, then eventually i could exhale the old air and take deep breaths. This is when it got embarrassing. The paramedics were nice - but because an EKG showed nothing wrong with my heart and because they could find no wheezing, and my o2 was 100 % (I was breathing like a freight train! And was probably hyperventilating?) - they were trying to indicate I was just a panicking 40 yro woman who freaking out at an asthma attack.

I MUST YELL HERE AT NOOOOO POINT IN THIS TIME DID I EVERRR PANIC.

I tried to explain how my asthma behaves and that it was lung capacity - not wheezing. They kept trying to find a heart attack and when that failed , they were just not interested and I felt like a fool.

To end the story i went to PCP yesterday(Mon) and saw the nurse practioner and she had no idea what could have happened either - so now I really, really, really, really feel like a freak. I tried see my husband asthma specialist but they don't have an appointment for over a month! See i can't handle this, i already have one freak condition. But I am really, really, scared now - I don't know what I did, or what to do to stop this from happening again. It has never happened before and I really couldn't breath.


Is it asthma? is it something else?