Ever watched a tight-rope walker? Providing support for a spouse with severe persistent asthma (or any chronic disease) can feel like tightrope walking. Acting on your concern about your loved one without taking over his or her health care unnecessarily is a balancing act of sorts. The good news is that you can keep your balance, especially with a safety net of knowledge to support you. Start by learning about your spouse’s asthma medication.

Asthma medications fall into two basic categories: long-term control (also called controllers) and quick-relief (also called rescue or reliever medications). In a nutshell, long-term control medications treat the underlying inflammation of asthma. Quick-relief medications provide fast relief when warning signs (like a low peak flow reading) suggest an asthma episode may be building. If possible, come along when the doctor is explaining medications to your spouse.

Show-and-tell

As a caregiver, your involvement with your spouse’s long-term control medication will probably start and end with picking up the prescription at the drugstore. You’ll want to know more, on the other hand, about quick-relief medications, because these are what you’ll reach for in an emergency. You do need to know which medication is which, because long-term control medications should never be used in place of quick-relief medications. They are not effective in an emergency.

Invite your spouse to a show-and-tell session. It might help to look at your spouse’s written asthma action plan at the same time. When warning signs and symptoms occur, the action plan should name specific medications (and other actions) to be taken. Those are the medications you’ll want to be able to find quickly. To learn them, take the following steps:

• Match the medications named on the action plan to the quick-relief medication itself (the pill bottle or inhaler).
• Learn the name of the quick-relief medication, in case you don’t have the action plan handy in an emergency.
• If multiple inhalers have been prescribed, look for a distinguishing characteristic (the color of the label, for example) that will help you spot the quick-relief medication in an emergency.

Asthma care is more than medication

As a caregiver, you don’t have direct control over the medication your spouse takes. While a hands-off approach to medication can be hard for a caregiver to maintain, it may help to know that there is at least one equally important way to help your loved one manage asthma. It’s called environmental control.

According to the National Asthma Education and Prevention Program (a project of the National Institutes of Health), avoiding asthma triggers through environmental control is as critical to good asthma management as medication. Since the average home is a hotbed of asthma triggers (like pollen, dust mites, pet dander, and more), careful cleaning can reduce your loved one’s exposure, and tip the balance in favor of successful asthma management. And you can take on environmental control yourself.

Learning more about trigger avoidance and environmental control measures will make the safety net you provide for your spouse stronger. Following through on the knowledge you gain will help you keep the balance between effective support for your spouse and taking over.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 26th, 2007 at 10:32 am and is filed under Caregivers. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.