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pecuniumI have had a cough since the flight back from London. I got a small cold in Scotland, and the effect of 14,000 miles of travel with the attendant dry air of airplanes, and the weather changes left me with a cough.
A persistent, non-productive cough.
Today, as I got to the exercise I was hacking a blue streak. Not to the point of physical exhaustion and collapse, but that sort of wracking, painful cough. The sort that comes in fits, not the one or two which had been the pattern for the past week.
Without much hope of relief, I went to see the docs.
They, wonder of wonders, had something. Not only did they have something (and not mere lozenges; what, by the way, is the practical effect of a cough drop? I don’t swallow them down my lungs, they go to my stomach), it really works.
Happily it’s not codeine. I hate codeine. I had to take it once for a really bad cough (I was coughing myself to the floor. Oxygen starvation was the only pause. When I was unable to power the diaphragm, it would pause, just long to get a breath and start over again. After a few minutes I gave up rising back to my knees and just lay on the carpet). The prescription was for two-weeks, after three days I was done.
Not only did it taste nasty (one of the most vile and bitter things I have ever had. It smelled of orange blossoms and tasted like ever bit of bitter lemon peel and used motor oil ever pulled from the bottom of a Sunkist harvest truck), but the effect my senses (as though I were playing out of time, and to a retarded beat from the rest of the world) made me wonder why; not to mention how, anyone used it as a recreational substance.
No, they prescribed Benadryl. Lo and behold it works. 50mg and my urge to cough was gone. On the negative side I am loggy. It’s not the cotton batting and out of synch of codeine, but rather a lassitude. I am half asleep when I stop being active. The mind is alert behind the eyelids, and I am in a near immediate state of reverie when I close them, but I am aware.
I am not at my best, but I neither is trying to interact with others a fruitless venture.
Forget the cough syrups, the lozenges and the salt-water gargles… a little pink pill and I am coming up roses.
A persistent, non-productive cough.
Today, as I got to the exercise I was hacking a blue streak. Not to the point of physical exhaustion and collapse, but that sort of wracking, painful cough. The sort that comes in fits, not the one or two which had been the pattern for the past week.
Without much hope of relief, I went to see the docs.
They, wonder of wonders, had something. Not only did they have something (and not mere lozenges; what, by the way, is the practical effect of a cough drop? I don’t swallow them down my lungs, they go to my stomach), it really works.
Happily it’s not codeine. I hate codeine. I had to take it once for a really bad cough (I was coughing myself to the floor. Oxygen starvation was the only pause. When I was unable to power the diaphragm, it would pause, just long to get a breath and start over again. After a few minutes I gave up rising back to my knees and just lay on the carpet). The prescription was for two-weeks, after three days I was done.
Not only did it taste nasty (one of the most vile and bitter things I have ever had. It smelled of orange blossoms and tasted like ever bit of bitter lemon peel and used motor oil ever pulled from the bottom of a Sunkist harvest truck), but the effect my senses (as though I were playing out of time, and to a retarded beat from the rest of the world) made me wonder why; not to mention how, anyone used it as a recreational substance.
No, they prescribed Benadryl. Lo and behold it works. 50mg and my urge to cough was gone. On the negative side I am loggy. It’s not the cotton batting and out of synch of codeine, but rather a lassitude. I am half asleep when I stop being active. The mind is alert behind the eyelids, and I am in a near immediate state of reverie when I close them, but I am aware.
I am not at my best, but I neither is trying to interact with others a fruitless venture.
Forget the cough syrups, the lozenges and the salt-water gargles… a little pink pill and I am coming up roses.
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no subject
Date: 2006-07-19 05:51 pm (UTC)