Sick Again
Posted by Erin | Filed under General
Back at the end of January, I got sick. While a cold, for a normal person, might last a few days and be done with, for me they drag on and on and on. I don’t think I truly started feeling “better” until sometime after Valentine’s Day.
And here I am again, exact. same. sickness. Day one, my throat and roof of my mouth feels itchy. By Day 3 or 4, my head is fully congested and I am breathing exclusively through my mouth. Because my nasal passages are the thickness of those thin plastic straws used as coffee stirrers, I congest easily.
And then the cough starts. Its a dry, unproductive, bone-rattling, bark of a cough. It feels like I have feathers, or itching powder, or dust, in my bronchial tubes. Nothing helps: not Nyquil, or coughdrops. Drinking water helps a little, because it usually allows some moisture to get coughed back up and that settles the itchyness for a little while. Then it slowly builds again until I can’t suppress the urge anymore.
Last Sunday is when my throat started feeling itchy. I took Monday off work hoping to not spread the disease around and wishing that it would just go away. Tuesday, I felt mostly “normal” so I went to work. Wednesday and Thursday I had off, and that’s when I really started feeling it. Friday, I’m sure I annoyed the piss out of everyone in DC3 by coughing and coughing, and coughing.
Friday evening my teammate Andrew treated our team to some awesome traditional Chinese food. The food was spicy. To me, super spicy. It cleared up my sinuses and the whole drive home, I felt great. But I still coughed. And the spicy eventually wore off and my congestion came back.
Here it is Sunday night again, and here I am, coughing, congested. I’ve coughed so much over the past few days I lost my voice (again – it happened last time too). I can’t sleep because I just lay there and cough. I’ve got to get up at 3:30am and put the finishing touches on the crockpot stew I made tonight and then get ready for work so I can walk out of the apartment by no later than 6am.
I can hear people asking, “Why don’t you go to a doctor?” – Because, I’ve had this so many times before, and gone to a doctor, only to be told “You probably just have a cold virus. There’s nothing we can give you that will make this go away faster. Just drink plenty of fluids, and get some rest.” Or, a couple of times, they’ve given me a week’s worth of antibiotics, which I take, and which are just as useless as Nyquil and cough drops against whatever-the-fuck-this-is.
April 12th, 2010 at 6:50
It sounds like what you might need are bronchiodialators – something that will relax your tubes, ease the swelling and whatnot. At the least, maybe a corticosteroid to help with the inflammation and itching? Sounds like your doctors aren’t really being very good to you – perhaps time to find a new one. Antibiotics? Good grief.
April 14th, 2010 at 15:56
Even though I’m feeling significantly better at this point, I’m going to contact some docs here in Wyoming on Friday and see if I can get an appt next week on one of my days off. I skipped my physical last year because I decided I didn’t like the doc in East Lansing I had seen the previous year. She ended up costing me $400+ out-of-pocket for a biopsy of a “suspicious” mole on my leg – a mole that has been there all my life and never changed.