Wendy Zuckerman

The medical name for a cough like Ella's, where you cough until you pass out, is called cough syncope.

And one day, while Ella was getting one of her many tests, Rosamund started Googling it.

Yeah.

Most of the people with cough syncope are middle-aged men who have been smoking for years.

It rarely happens to kids.

One of Ella's doctors said that her case was so odd that they wanted to write about it in a medical journal, which Ella was actually kind of excited about.

And Ella would go on to be written up in many medical journals, making international news and helping perhaps thousands of people breathe easier.

But in the middle of all this, Rosamund and Ella didn't know any of that.

And then there was this one final but really important mystery here.

If this truly was asthma, then what was triggering it?

For most asthmatics, you get an attack because it's triggered by something.

Cigarette smoke, mould, cleaning products.

That stuff gets in your lungs and causes this huge inflammatory reaction and then your airways constrict.

But doctors tested Ella for all kinds of stuff, and none of those triggers made sense.

And the thing is, Ella didn't always have attacks.

They'd come in clusters, but when she was feeling OK, Rosamund would try hard to keep things normal.

Ella loved listening to music, so they'd put on her favourite songs and dance around to them.

Rosamund remembers this one song that she loved by Justin Timberlake and Jay-Z.

It had just come out.

This was early 2013.