Still alive, can’t believe I still feel so crummy. Hopefully the antibiotics will kick in soon.
Dunno if Mucinex is bad; it makes me uber-hyper.
I had this too. Pretty much from New Year’s to March. I don’t know how much good the antibiotics did but rest and an inhaler were helpful. And yes I was super tired.
I actually had very little, if anything, coming up when I coughed. Just spasms without end.
Glad you got some relief. Hopefully you’re on the mend!
It’s the guaifenesin. Don’t take it at night. The dextromethorphan is fine.
I have sore muscles from coughing. Feels like I did 1,000 sit-ups.
We’ve got a strain of it floating around my work right now. Last week one of my coworkers was sent home looking like death warmed over. She called out sick the next day. The day after that her mother came and told us coworker will be out indefinitely.
I’ve been fighting a dry cough and achy sinuses since last weekend. No fever, but I’m suddenly very, very physically weary. I fell asleep for a good portion of yesterday afternoon.
Nope. I took it for the better part of a year some time back, and I’m fine.
twitch
Husband has been coughing and wheezing since the beginning of April. He’s seen the doctor twice - once when he coughed so hard he passed out (which scared the piss out of me, it looked like he was having a seizure), and once when his inhaler ran out and he needed a refill. Both times the same thing: breathing treatments, a scrip for a few days of steroids, a scrip for antibiotics, and an inhaler. Both times the same results: Great for the first day, very good until the steroid prescription ran out, then back to normal. They xrayed his lungs both times, said it wasn’t pneumonia, which is good to know.
It’s now been two months and he’s barely better than he was when all this started - coughing and wheezing constantly, and he gets winded literally going from the living room to the bedroom. Fortunately he has a third doctor’s appt scheduled for tomorrow.
I had it for about 4 weeks in April. My doctor tried telling me it was allergies. I had post-nasal waterfalls, was coughing until I vomited, didn’t sleep at all off/on for about a week, the rest of the time it was in 1-2 hour chunks (but I didn’t get more than 5 hours/night at ALL), pulled a chest muscle, and was SO fatigued I would get exhausted just walking to the car.
On the plus side, I lost almost 20lbs.
I had an albuterol inhaler, also took Advair twice a day, Nasonex, and went through a bazillion cough drops.
I kept telling my doctor it wasn’t allergies, but she would not listen.
It’s been only in the past two weeks that I’ve felt relatively ‘normal’. I’m FINALLY getting back into the pool tonight. I tried once in April, in the depths of the misery, and barely made it 10 minutes before I thought I was going to die. Had to have help getting out (I felt SO pathetic).
Voice of Doom checking in: beware chlorine fumes whilst in the pool and be sure to shower off after to get it all off ya (especially your hair).
Coughing is hard work.
I haven’t had a cold in ten years, and I got suddenly filled up with snot/mucus/phlegm a week ago in Guyana. No other serious symptoms, so it might have been some kind of allergy to something in the air. I started taking Benedryls, and it’s taken a week to nearly go away. Last fall I got real bronchitis, diagnosed by a doctor, and treated with Rx, from breathing shitty air from the AC in a shithole hotel in Manila, the only city in the world worse than Cairo. Until now, the only airborne allergens that have affected me is montane pine pollen in early summer.
I am an annual bronchitis suffered. I went about 6-7 years without getting it, then it started coming back about 2 years ago.
I get it around August-November.
If I get the slightest tingle in my lungs, I head to the doctor and get whatever they will give me. Steroids, a breathing treatment, etc.
I can usually beat it before it gets too severe. 3 years ago, I had to take 3 straight days off.
Why are some people prone to recurring bronchitis? I don’t think I’m allergic to anything. It just kind of happens.
After about a half hour in the pool, the coughing started back up, not as deep and hacking, but enough to give me a blinding headache. Once I left the pool, it stopped.
So, it’s machines for a little while longer…
Don’t laugh: change your pillow case(s) frequently (daily, if possible)–you’d be surprised what gets on them from your hair, and the wonderful accumulated combinations that can tickle your bronchs.
I had bronchitis in December/January that lasted for about a month. Not fun. It was also not fun when a doctor gave me a prescription for bronchitis medication that I turned out to be allergic to, and got a neon-pink rash all over my body. So I had to stop the meds and wait for the bronchitis to finally go away on its own.
:D:D
More gasoline for the fire: if you’re into this kinda thing, there’s a movie (on Amazon) called, “Black Death.” Stars Sean (“Lord of the Rings”) Bean, Eddie Redmayne and Carice Van Houten (no relation to Milhouse); it’s violent, bloody, sacrilegious and has a downer ending. I love it; seen it 3 times in the last couple years and now I wanna see it again. You’ll either feel better after watching it–because you don’t have it–or you’ll be convinced your days are numbered.
And David Warner. He’s always fun.
Checking back into the plague pit: I’m still hacking and wheezing. I finished the amoxicillin yesterday and have improved an iota. I can’t take the promethazine cough syrup, it makes me feel really spacey and almost disassociative (is this the stuff that was in “drank”?) The inhaler helps a bit.
As mentioned above, it’s the fatigue that’s killing me. I have to stop several times in the short walk from parking lot to office and I’m spending most of my time at home riding the couch.
Oye, at least I didn’t get this during the semester, when my sick colleagues were staggering through teaching classes (but a pox on them for spreading germs all over! :mad:)
*I think that because the amoxi didn’t make much of a difference this is probably viral rather than bacterial.
**I read a great book about tuberculosis yesterday. I think I need a fainting couch and a lace handkerchief cough cough
Just got out of the hospital with bronchitis. I thought it was pneumonia, like old fashioned little house on the prairie you die from it pneumonia. I could only sip like a half teaspoon of air at a time. Now I have an inhaler and an appoint at a pulmonary clinic for followup.
My sympathies!! Not super-recent, but I had a dose of this back in October. After 2 weeks of things getting worse (but not actually causing an asthma flare, as far as I could tell), I went to urgent care. Started on a course of oral steroids.
2 days later, no better. They gave me a shot of a steroid, and “Oh, don’t fill this, but just in case” antibiotics. That was on a Thursday. I decided that was bullshit, filled it the next day, and was feeling very slightly better by Monday when I was able to see my regular doc.
Urgh - microwave was running, which impedes the wireless here, and made me timeout my edit:
My sympathies!! Not super-recent, but I had a dose of this back in October. After 2 weeks of things getting worse (but not actually causing an asthma flare, as far as I could tell), I went to urgent care. Started on a course of oral steroids.
2 days later, no better. They gave me a shot of a steroid, and “Oh, don’t fill this, but just in case” antibiotics. That was on a Thursday. I decided that was bullshit, filled it the next day, and was feeling very slightly better by Monday when I was able to see my regular doc. Still not great, but a little better. Doc said “Give it one more day, if still no improvement, try this other antibiotic”.
Well by the next day it was enough better that we no longer felt the need to cancel a long-planned, long-anticipated vacation we were to leave on, but it was close.
While “antibiotics don’t help viruses” is certainly true and you don’t want to overuse antibiotics, there’s a fair chance in this situation that you may have developed a secondary infection. That’s something that happens to me pretty regularly (I’m asthmatic which I think makes me more susceptible) - and yeah, it does leave me wiped out for a week or more. I’ve managed to avoid pneumonia so far, fortunately.
In my case the coughing was so severe I was unable to sleep, a minor(ish) herniated disc was causing major pain from the coughing, and I’m fairly sure I tore a muscle somewhere in my abdomen. I’m sorry I waited as long as I did to get medical care.
And now caught up on the thread: Did they do a chest X-ray to see if you had pneumonia? or just try antibiotics just in case?
Did they attempt to do a sputum culture? (not sure if that’s routine, or useful).
Did they consider giving you steroid inhaler or is yours “just” a bronchodilator (Albuterol / salbutamol being the most common)?
A nebulizer does a slightly better job than a regular inhaler - finer mist, longer dosing time. Even though I didn’t officially have an asthma flareup, the albuterol neb helped open up my breathing passages a bit more and helped bring up the crud. A regular inhaler barely touched it. I wound up using that thing multiple times a day for something like 3 weeks - well after we got back from vacation. Of course if you don’t have a nebulizer lying around the house that’s tougher to do, but they aren’t THAT expensive and can be rented short-term sometimes.
Honestly, if you’re still this disabled after nearly 2 weeks, you should probably go back to see a doctor again. It sounds like you aren’t any better at all.
When I was at my sickest, I used codeine cough syrup at bedtime to try to get some sleep. Not a good idea to suppress such a productive cough but in my case the tradeoff was because I had to get some kind of rest.
Now, a bad case of the hacking crud can leave you wiped out. I almost never take sick time, and I lost 20 hours of work time the second week (before the antibiotics kicked in), didn’t do much more than that the next week, and would probably have lost time the following week if we hadn’t gone out of town. I was barely feeling human by the time we got back.
Gross hint to help clear the gunk: The coughing my body does on its own just hurts my throat and chest and does fuck-all to help get rid of the phlegm. I’ve figured out a technique where I stiffen my throat muscles as much as possible, while breathing in and out as deeply and quickly as possible a few times, suppressing the actual cough by sheer force of will. That seems to shake things loose - at which point one or two good coughs is VERY productive. Repeat a while later as needed. Much less painful overall.
I wonder if this is what Rachel Maddow had. A week ago Friday, she was on the air while sick, and she did not sound good. She finally came back this evening, and STILL didn’t sound much better.