After being caught in a house fire I was left semi conscious and barely breathing lying outside on the lawn with the rest of my family. I had gone back inside to save the pets, the birds and the cat but the cat had already gone so I was looking for nothing. The fire had started in the lounge room where a spark from the fire place had jumped onto the rug which set the rug on fire. The blaze spread rapidly through the house and I was overcome by the smoke before I had time to think about getting any of our other stuff out of the house. Everything was gone including our clothes, photo albums, everything.

While I was sitting on the lawn trying to get my breath back one of the neighbors offered me a puff on his steroid inhaler otherwise known as an asthma inhaler. With the 2 little puffs that I took I was instantly able to breathe better and my airways seemed to free up of smoke. When the ambulance arrived the paramedic told me that this was not a good idea to take a steroid inhaler if I did not have an asthma problem but it worked and the paramedic was relieved in a way because I was not too bad off from all the smoke I had inhaled. So the moral to the story would be not to borrow a steroid inhaler unless you have asthma or unless you have just saved your love birds from your house burning down.