THE near-death experience of an asthmatic Wellington toddler is to be used by a national charity to try to save other children’s lives across the UK.

Asthma UK is to share via its website a short video clip and account of three-year-old Jake Burns lying unconscious as his body struggled for life.

Jake survived because he was already in Musgrove Park Hospital, Taunton, after parents Darren and Alice Burns called an ambulance when his symptoms worsened.

Doctors quickly spotted Jake was experiencing ‘silent chest’, where the lungs stop working because they have filled with carbon dioxide and the heart is taking its last few beats.

Jake’s distraught mother tried to film some of the drama on her mobile phone but only managed to record 11 seconds before she broke down.

Fortunately, the hospital’s emergency crash team was able to revive Jake after several frantic minutes.

Despite the trauma of the occasion, Mr and Mrs Burns, of Aspin Road, have agreed to share the experience as a case study through Asthma UK.

They want to encourage parents not to delay seeking help if their children suffer an asthma attack and to try to help them identify some of the less common symptoms which may occur.

Jake’s asthma attack was aggravated by an infection he had picked up, and many of the symptoms did not appear too serious, such as an occasional cough, hunching of the shoulders, and heavy sweating.

In total, he spent nine days in hospital across two separate admissions before doctors were satisfied he was on the way to a full recovery.

Mrs Burns said: “We are just so thankful we did not wait any longer before getting Jake into hospital because otherwise he would not be here now.

“For a lot of the time, he did not seem too bad and we were giving him his medicine and his inhaler, but then quite suddenly nothing we did seemed to help.

“We rang 999 for an ambulance and he actually perked up again after some oxygen and nebulisers in the ambulance, and when we were in the accident and emergency department he seemed fine.

“He was sat up chatting and playing and we were reading a story and the doctors said we should be fine to go home soon. But while reading a story Jake began to sweat profusely and then started to cough and ask for his ‘puffer’.

“We were rushed into the high dependency unit and I was holding Jake’s hand while he sat on my husband’s lap as he turned grey, a grey I cannot even describe.

“He then went unconscious and we laid him on the bed where he really started to fight for breath.

“The crash call was made to the intensive care team and a doctor listened to his chest and could not hear anything.

“He was given a lot of medication through an intravenous drip, and as the team were getting ready to incubate, Jake opened his eyes. I do not know how I did not collapse.

“We were told Jake had developed respiratory acidosis, where too much CO2 is produced in the lungs and this led to ‘silent chest’, which is where there is no longer air getting into the lungs to make them work, so the chest goes silent, which happens moments before respiratory failure.

“It still makes us feel sick now to think our son’s lungs stopped working.”

Mrs Burns said she and her husband now appreciated how asthma could strike from nowhere and they had learned to trust their gut instinct if something seemed wrong and seek hospital help urgently.

She said: “Heart-breaking as it is to watch, we hope this video helps others. If it helps educate just one parent on common and not so common symptoms, or gives just one parent confidence to seek help when their gut is telling them to, then we feel it is worth sharing. Something good will then have come from this horrible experience.”

Asthma UK said 5.4 million people in the UK were currently receiving treatment for asthma, including 1.1 million children, with three people a day dying.

The charity’s director of marketing, Lindsay Gormley, said: “Alice’s video is incredibly powerful and we hope that by sharing this it will help other parents of young children to find out more about asthma and asthma attacks.

“The reality is that it can be difficult to diagnose asthma in very young children so there may be parents whose children do not even have a diagnosis of asthma who are watching this and who may find it helpful.

“A child is admitted to hospital for their asthma every three hours in the UK and tragically the equivalent of a classroom of children die because of asthma attacks every year.

“We want to thank Alice for sharing her video with us and we are so glad that Jake is ok now. We cannot begin to imagine what they must have gone through.”