Teleidoscope

Thu, Feb 07, 2008

Cough from Hell

Posted at 10:48 pm MST to Miscellaneous

I spent most of yesterday coughing every few minutes. And it was a really nasty cough.

When I went to bed, I thought that if I was still coughing that much this morning, I should probably call my doctor's office. And if things got any worse, (breathing became difficult, for example, instead of just being interrupted by the coughing) a visit to urgent care might be in order.

Today has been much better. In the first 12 hours after I got up this morning, I only had a couple of very minor coughing spells, without using any meds. I've been coughing again this evening, but I think that is because I am running out of energy even though I took it very easy today. (Naturally today, when I might have been able to talk without coughing, I did not have any conference calls. Even the one that was originally scheduled got cancelled.)

I also cleaned out all of the leftovers in my refrigerator that were even slightly iffy. I don't want to be challenging my system when it busy fighting off the crud.

I hope there will be more improvement tomorrow.

For now, I've taken some Advil to knock down the inflammation caused by the coughing. This was recommended by the doctor I used a number of years ago: when you have been doing a lot of coughing, you reach a point where some of the coughing is trying to clear the bronchial obstruction caused by the tissues that have been irritated by the earlier coughing, which doesn't hardly work. Knocking down the inflammation breaks the cycle.

I wish I'd known the Advil trick when I was a kid (it's supposed to work with aspirin, too, but not with Tylenol. which kills pain but doesn't affect inflammation as much). My Dad used to yell at me because I got stuck in cycles of coughing-because-I-had-been-coughing.

Talk about blaming the victim: as if him smoking in the house all of the years I was growing up had nothing to do with it. As if him smoking in the house when I was coughing had nothing to do with my not being able to stop coughing.

In the summer, when the windows were open it wasn't as bad, but in the winter... well, it's probably just as well no one ever brought a canary into the house after my Mom went into the hospital. She always aired the place out at least once a week, even in cold weather, on Saturday when we cleaned the house and changed the sheets. I don't know whether Dad knew that. He probably wouldn't have bothered with such a waste of heating oil even if he had known it was part of her routine.

I remember going home for a visit about this time of year, and opening the back door and being engulfed by an appalling wave of stale cigarette smoke. I went around opening every window in the house to try to get some cross-ventilation to clear things out a bit. Dad was angry and insulted, but by then it was about 8 years since I had bee a full-time winter resident (college, grad school, and a couple of years in my own first apartments) and I had gotten used to the luxury of breathing actual air.

I do not react well to environments with cigarette smoke in them. I am so glad tolerance for side smoke has receded over the years.

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