Octave symptoms and conditions

I am a part-time professional singer and attorney. I developed an odd cough-variant asthma this winter at age 42 -- it had scary breath shortness and wheezing plus lots of phlegm coughed up. I had never before had the shortness/wheezing/asthma, though I have always had allergies and occasional bronchitis following a cold. The asthma/allergy specialists put me on Advair 500 twice a day with each attack, plus an oral prednisone burst/short taper, nebulized (not just rescue inhaler) albuterol (beta 2 agonist), and antibiotics (a different one each time). I also take Claritin, Rhinocort and Astelin for my allergies. I had four attacks of asthma this winter that were treated this way; after the fourth, they put me on Advair 250 maintenance for a month. With each attack, I would get hoarse, have trouble sleeping, and get odd muscle cramps I never had had. The hoarseness was worse each time, but I was able to sing through it at my regular gigs. I attributed the side effects to the prednisone. With my fifth attack, they told me to ramp up the Advair to 500 and do all else the same, but as an experiment to see how this would alter those side effects, I decided to treat it with everything but the prednisone. The hoarseness, sleep trouble, and muscle cramps were all much worse. I found this site, noted the recommendation of several other singers to try Asmanex instead of Advair, and asked the docs about it. They agreed that all these symptoms could be related to the Advair and gave me Asmanex 250 twice/day instead instead of the Advair, plus all the other meds for the attack. The symptoms went away within a week, although it took a little longer for me to get over the asthma attack this time. I am extremely grateful to this site and all the users posting comments. I can sing again, sleep again, and exist without weird muscle cramps during treatment of my asthma. Thank you very much.

Almost completely lost my singing voice after only 11 days (an octave is gone)! Sudden and terrible acid reflux though I quit eating "bad" foods long ago.

To everyone who has taken this stuff for a long time, and has taken the time to share details here, THANK YOU!

No more Advair.

I was at the end of an MRI session when the doctor asked for one more picture. They inserted an IV and dripped in Prohance and stuck me back in the MRI machine. Within a minute I was sneezing uncontrollably, continuing to sneeze for about two minutes. My throat felt very rough, my ears burned. When they took me out of the machine, my voice (normally a bass speaking voice) was at least an octave higher and sounded frayed and pretty much shot. I also was very dizzy. They hastily pulled out the Prohance tube and started feeding me Benadryl via IV. I had no more sneezing and started feeling better, but the dizziness continued. Fortunately, a friend was with me to drive me home. The dizziness lessened over the next several hours, and my voice slowly returned to normal. But it was at least 12 hours before I felt really normal.