Eileen
Eileen, age 62, was diagnosed with asthma in her early 40’s. She is white British and works at a university as a finance officer. She is divorced with three adult children. At first she found it very difficult to manage her life as she suffered from very frequent asthma attacks. However over time she was able to learn how to self-manage her asthma through recognising the triggers in good time and to self-medicate early enough to prevent things from worsening, and nowadays she rarely has an asthma attack.
Eileen, age 62, was diagnosed with asthma in her early 40’s. She is white British and works at a university as a finance officer. She is divorced with three adult children. At first she found it very difficult to manage her life as she suffered from very frequent asthma attacks. However over time she was able to learn how to self-manage her asthma through recognising the triggers in good time and to self-medicate early enough to prevent things from worsening, and nowadays she rarely has an asthma attack.
Eileen was diagnosed with asthma when she was in her early 40’s. She had been out cycling one day with her son when she began feeling unusually breathless – she went to see her GP, who diagnosed asthma. This came as a surprise as she had not realised that people could develop asthma at any time in life. At the time Eileen was experiencing a stressful time in her personal life which she feels triggered her asthma and over the next few years whilst she was going through a lot of emotional stress she found her asthma was very difficult to control. She learned how to self monitor her use of inhalers (preventers and relievers) using a peak flow monitor which helped her to work out how many times a day to use them, but spent several years feeling very unwell for long periods of time, and she very often had to take a steroids (prednisolone) and antibiotics in addition to the inhalers. At this time asthma impacted hugely on Eileen’s life and there were times when she said I actually didn’t want to live because I couldn’t do anything’. She found that walking any distance became very difficult without taking a break to sit down and get her breath back, and she would often experience coughing fits at night time when she was in bed that left her unable to breath or sleep, as well as finding some of the side effects from the prednisolone difficult to cope with.
Gradually over time Eileen was able to identify the main triggers for her asthma, which as well as stress included having a bad cold and eating wheat based and dairy based foods. Once she knew what triggered the attacks she began to learn to anticipate when it might be a good idea to either begin taking steroids or antibiotics, or to avoid certain foods that she knew would exacerbate her condition. As well as taking the prescribed medication when necessary, Eileen consulted a Chinese herbalist which she found very helpful as an additional support.
Now Eileen still uses her preventer inhalers regularly, but finds that she rarely needs to use her reliever inhaler as her asthma is well controlled although she says it took about 8 years to get to this stage where asthma no longer dominates her life.
Through her experience Eileen has become involved as a volunteer speaker for Asthma UK and feels it is important to pass on her own experience and the knowledge she has gained about asthma to others.