Flu season behind

GRACE SPEAKS ON BATTLE TO DRAW BREATH

GRACE Slevin (pictured) may be just 13 but she knows all too well the beginning of an asthma attack.

She feels her chest tighten, as if there is crushing weight on her small frame. Then dread and fear set in. “It feels like a person is sitting on my chest,” she explains. “Like someone is covering my nose and my mouth is halfshut as I try to breathe.

“Then there are the pains around my lungs when it happens.”

Speaking from her Geelong hospital bed last week, the Grovedale teen hopes to raise awareness of asthma by telling her own story, following an ambulance ride to the Emergency Department.

“It’s exhausting and a bit scary,” Grace says.

Strewn among her pile of teen magazines and sandwich wrappers are lifesaving medicines, Ventolin puffers, oxygen masks and pills.

Grace’s mother, Sharon Klodinski, says she knew there was something wrong with Grace’s breathing from the time she was two.

By age three, Grace had been diagnosed with asthma.

It would be the start of an ongoing relationship with Geelong Hospital, with annual admissions to the children’s ward for treatment.

From pollens, to pet dander, cold air and dust, the list of asthma triggers for Grace is almost as long as her hospital file.

Like her father, Grace has spent much of her young life struggling to breathe.

In 2016 her condition worsened more than it had ever done before, resulting in the Geelong High student being admitted to the hospital’s Intensive Care Unit (ICU) for six days.

Mrs Klodinski said it was important for others in the community to understand the serious impact that contracting viruses such as the flu could have on people with asthma, and encouraged people to refrain from going to school or work when they were sick, to help prevent the spread of their illness.