Kit Roberts
A woman has recalled the 'utterly terrifying' moment that she nearly died from a condition which affects millions of people.
Sharon Marshall appeared on This Morning, where she told of how she had started to get hay fever each Spring, but one year things got particularly bad.
As the years went by, Sharon found that her hay fever was getting progressively worse, and she started trying lots of different ways to try and manage the health condition.
No matter what she did, whether it eye drops, vaseline in her nose, closing windows, washing her hair, humidifiers, and even antihistamines, nothing seemed to do the trick.
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But then one year Sharon recalled that things suddenly took a very serious turn, and she ended up having a very serious, potentially life-threatening medical episode.
"I woke up, and I was a single girl at the time, and I woke up in the middle of the night, and I just couldn't breathe," she told the show.
"I didn't know at the time that that was an asthma attack, because I'd never had one before, and I didn't know that I had it. It was utterly terrifying."
Sharon explained that she couldn't 'think straight', and decided to wait until the morning when the doctor's surgery opened.
"It was like being buried alive, which I know sounds very dramatic," she said. "You're scared, you get really scared."
After ringing the surgery she was told to 'come in immediately' and took a taxi to the doctor, where she collapsed.
"I came round in the back of an ambulance," she said.
After she asked to go home so she could feed her cat, a paramedic in the ambulance told her: "You're going into cardiac arrest, we're trying to take you to hospital to save your life, no you can't feed your cat."
Sharon would spend a week in hospital recovering, and after saying that she didn't smoke she was told that she had adult onset asthma, and was prescribed strong asthma medication.
Over the years, Sharon would go to the doctors in the Spring, saying that just weeks earlier she had been running 5km in the park, but now couldn't even make it up the stairs at the surgery.
Wanting to cover all the bases, doctors even even sent Sharon for lung cancer scans, until eventually a chance encounter at work led her to realize what was wrong.
Sharon, who works on The Morning, encountered Professor Adam Fox who regularly appears as an expert on the TV program, and he figured out that she has 'Seasonal allergic asthma'.
Professor Fox explained that this is a form of the condition which only comes up during pollen season.
This is when your upper airway reacts to pollen in a particularly severe way, and can send those 'angry' signals down to your lungs, and trigger an asthma attack.