Coughing

[ladyofastolat]

When I get a cold, it often ends up going directly to my chest, and staying there for several weeks. This is not something that I choose to happen deliberately. It is not actually very nice to be unable to sleep for coughing or to be unable to walk far because you can't breathe properly. It is not nice to have whole half hour stretches when you simply cannot stop coughing, and you end up dizzy, unable to stand, sometimes actually physically sick. It is not done deliberately. Stopping a coughing fit is an impossibility.

Fortunately, I've only had half a dozen really bad coughs in the last ten years or so (though one was by far the worst ever), but when I was a teenager, I got them a couple of times a year. Although I was a horribly well-behaved and virtuous child, I still got glared at by some teachers, who reacted as if I was choosing to cough in their lesson. Yes, I know that it's very annoying when someone else is coughing, but what was I supposed to do? The school wouldn't have wanted me to miss three weeks of school just for a cough; few schools or work places are happy accepting "cold" as a reason to stay at home. I couldn't gasp "excuse me" and walk out of the lesson, which is what I would do now at work. The rules kept me there, and I had a cough, and the rest was inavoidable.

The thing that has always annoyed me most is when people offer totally inadequate "solutions", then react badly if you reject them - as if they've offered you the magic cure and you've refused it, therefore it's all your fault. When your lungs are clogged up, a drink of water does not help in the slightest, even though it might help with a different sort of cough. When every attempt to breathe in might suddenly turn into an enormous gasping inhalation, the last thing you want in your mouth is a boiled sweet, which could choke you. When you're desperately gasping for the first proper breath you've taken in half a minute, it really, really, really doesn't help if someone suddenly thumps you on the back when you're trying to take it.

Of course I know that coughing is annoying to others, which is why I wouldn't dream of going to a concert or the cinema or anything similar when I had one. I've missed things that I really wanted to see because they coincided with a cough. I know that some people are less conscientious about this, and go to such places even when coughing all over the place. But when you've gone to a place that you have no choice about going, and are coughing through no choice of your own, I do wish that people wouldn't react as if you're doing it deliberately, and could stop at any time.

Oh, and while I'm here and ranting, can I just say how annoying I find it when I feel absolutely awful, and instead of saying anything nice, people just say angrily, "you'd better not give it to me," and then if they end up catching a cold something like three weeks later, say, "I've got your cold," even if you were actually long past your infectious period when you met them.

Comments

[adaese.livejournal.com]

When (aged about 9 or 10, I think) I broke my collar bone, I was given some exercises to do by a physio. I was supposed to do them two or three times a day. But when I had the not-so-bright idea of doing a set while the rest of the class was doing PE, I got into real trouble with the PE mistress, who said if I was mended enough to be doing stretching exercises, I was mended enough to be doing gym.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

It might be worth getting yourself checked out on the asthma front. I've had coughing experiences like you describe and apparently it is (at least) partly due to my asthma. Indeed I can give myself an asthma attack by laughing! The only way to stop that is to hold my breath; all the time I'm trying to breath in the asthma is reacting and closing down my airways. When I've held my breath for a few tens of seconds everything has relaxed and I can breath again.

[ladyofastolat.livejournal.com]

I'd never thought of that. Having read up the symptoms of asthma, I don't think it sounds the same, but you never know. When I get a cough, it's very clearly because there's stuff in my lungs, rather than being anything to do with my airways, but I suppose I could ask someone next time I get a really bad one. (The cough I've got at the moment is annoying, but nothing like as bad as many in the past.)

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

One of the things that asthma does is prolong any period of having a cough. A non-asthma sufferer might have their cough for a few days, while an asthma sufferer could well have it for several weeks. That's certainly been the case with me.

Also the airways that asthma affects can be right down in the lungs as well as higher up.

[bunn.livejournal.com]

I darkly suspect 'asthma' to be a generic term for a variety of Weird Things Lungs Do Sometimes. If they give you an inhaler and you say that helps then they put 'asthma' on your notes.

(Before that they give you a flow meter thing to blow into, but if the flow meter thing registers nothing unusual, or in my case, reports a lung capacity that would apparently be adequate to service a small elephant, but you are still complaining and haven't gone away, they give you an inhaler anyway).

The inhaler seems to be kind of like beer for lungs: it just encourages them to relax and loosen up.

[helflaed.livejournal.com]

I could have posted that.

I don't have asthma, but I do have very sensitive lungs. If I have any kind of cold I end up coughing until I go red and can hardly breathe for weeks afterwards. I've been on antibiotics more times than I care to remember. There is nothing wrong with my lung capacity of peak flow, so for years it went undiagnosed because it wasn't asthma.

In the end I was prescribed a Ventolin inhaler. It has changed my life.

[sigisgrim.livejournal.com]

There's nothing wrong with my peak flow either; it's normally in the 700-750 range, off the scale of most peak flow meters. But I'm still asthmatic. I wasn't diagnosed with asthma until I was about 30.

[evilmissbecky.livejournal.com]

I remember having bronchitis as a kid, and coughing so badly at the dinner table my dad finally snapped, "Can't someone do something about her?" Like you said, as if I was choosing to cough like that!