The house dust mite takeover 

That title sounds like something out of a horror movie but the last couple of days have been pretty horrific.

It is half term and, of course, that means a calm and relaxing family break. Wrong. The husband and I have been planning a long overdue room reshuffle and treated ourselves to some new furniture. Exciting yes. Relaxing? Not a bit.

We live in a three storey townhouse and I’m sure than many, many furniture delivery men have stories about idiots that live in them and buy furniture that will not go up the very narrow stairs.

We were those idiots when we first moved in. Of course the stairs are narrow but we were giddy with excitement about our first family home.  Narrow stairs wouldn’t stop us.   We ordered a large leather corner sofa. We threw caution to the wind and didn’t measure, it would be fine. It was of course, far from fine. R was a baby at the time and the poor delivery men had to take the sofa to pieces, in the end, to get the thing upstairs. I was in pieces after the several hours that it took to finally get it in and the giddiness started to wear off. We joked that that we would leave the house before the sofa but of course, ten years of children jumping on it has taken its toll and the sofa was in a very sad way indeed.

We knew that getting it out would be difficult. The husband talked of pushing it out of the window but apart from not knowing how we could do that, I worried it would end up crashing into the neighbours garden. Definitely not a good move.

The only option was to take it apart. We spent ages unscrewing and bashing and even in two pieces we found ourselves wedged in the stairwell trying to get it down.  It was no good, we had to rip it up.

It was quite therapeutic but the dust and foam were horrendous.

Finally about two hours later, the sofa was in about thirty pieces in the drive and we were feeling very pleased with our achievement. Then L started to get wheezy.

He is allergic to dust mites and I hadn’t even thought about how the sofa would affect him. He slowly got worse as the evening progressed and really struggled for breath during the night.

The next morning he was worse and we took him to the GP. She confirmed that it was quite an extreme allergic reaction and that we would have filled the air with allergens which would have caused him to have such a bad reaction. She prescribed inhalers for two weeks and we went home.

As the day went on, he became worse and had become so distressed and anxious that he was making himself worse. By the early evening, he could barely speak and we called for help. In minutes, a paramedic came and put him on a nebuliser. It was all pretty scary, both for L and us.

The nebuliser worked its magic and the paramedic did a wonderful job of calming L down who was convinced that he was on death’s door before he arrived.  Within minutes, his oxygen levels were normal and he was breathing properly again. I’m so glad that we called, it is often easy in these situations to not call for help and to try and cope on your own, but as I have learnt before, when a child can’t breathe, it is something that you have to take seriously.

We were given the option of going to the hospital but as L seemed calmer and less wheezy, we opted to stay at home and with regular use of his Ventolin, he had a much better night.

Two days later and he is still not one hundred percent but he is much better.  He will be on inhalers for another week or so and we have a follow-up appointment after that to check everything has settled down.

I feel awful for subjecting my son to something that has made him so ill, I would certainly never have thought about it beforehand.  It has made us think about our next sofa too, it will have to one that either splits naturally into smaller pieces or one which is narrow enough to get up the stairs as I certainly don’t want to put L through another allergic reaction again.