Relentless child coughing

My son has been diagnosed with asthma, mostly due to the severity of sickness he experiences from even a minor cold. He hasn’t had any official testing as I’m in Canada and apparently he hasn’t been old enough yet (he turned 5 this year.) He has always had a very barky-sounding cough, even since he was a small toddler, and some level of congestion even when not sick. Yesterday, he started coughing a crazy amount. It reached a point where he could not go even ten seconds without coughing and it lasted over 12 hours. Sometimes he would almost wretch from the coughing, but never did spit anything up.

He takes his Flovent puffer twice daily and we were giving him his rescue inhaler multiple times but it did nothing. He never was truly short of breath, just could not stop coughing as if something was triggering the cough response constantly. This has happened 3 or 4 times now, I’ve never heard another child cough like this before.

I’d love to hear of any experiences like this, I don’t have a great understanding of asthma myself and feel like we really need something to help him when these attacks happen, as they don’t sound like asthma attacks I hear about where you’re short of breath or having trouble breathing. We will of course continue trying to get answers from our doctor but we have yet to get help with this specific issue.