Asthma in Children

Sooooo we've been dealing with asthma here. My older son recently developed asthma, I guess starting in Jan. This has been his third episode and pretty scary. The MD is ready to put him on twice daily pulmicort, the NP wasn't ready and I am not ready for this either. I think I will try to figure out something else.

1. First, I will set his room up to be as dust free as possible (my husband did this over the weekend, cleaning room, and buying dust mite covers for everything.)
2. Second we need to buy him a bed, his old one broke and now his mattress is on the floor.
3. Third, as soon as I hear a cough I will start him up with pulmicort and xopenex.

If this plan doesn't work, then I will have to do twice daily nebulizer treatments of pulmicort. This will be almost impossible as I have to bribe him just to do the ones were are doing now. At one point he was so tired and lethargic he didn't argue and I was giving him treatments almost every two hours. since they weren't working I brought him to the pediatricians office. They were really worried about him, but after a dose of prednisone and increasing the xopenex and pulmicort he did much better. The only problem there was how he reacted to the prednisone. I had to ask them to decrease that dose because it made him nuts along with the double dose of xopenex. He as like a monster. Once everthing was back to normal and I decreased his meds, his reactions were better.
I wonder if anyone else is in a similar situation and would like to share their suggestions with me? I haven't had a chance to do much research on the net, and will try to look for links to post here.


I liked the Amercan Lung Association's site on childhood asthma. Now I need some good blog sites.