Coffee heat rising

Is This EVER Gonna Go Away?

Up since 2:00 a.m. coughing and gagging. This is bar none THE worst respiratory ailment I’ve ever had. Have lost track of how long this had been going on because I’m too sick to think, but my sense is it’s been about a month or six weeks. I’m beginning to think it’s never going to clear up.

Guess I’ll have to call the crew at the Mayo again. Ugh! How I hate having to beat my way through rank after rank of gatekeepers to get at a doctor. Apparently they’re hired to block patients from talking to doctors. Then, whenever I do manage to get an appointment, the damn clinic is an hour’s drive away through homicidal traffic.

My neighbor across the street recommended her doctor. I looked up his practice in Healthgrades and discovered one of the partners was defrocked in Connecticut for recurrent drug abuse. Oh brother. When you’ve been thrown out of practice in a civilized state, what d’you do? Come to Arizona and open a new practice!

Onward to Angie’s List. Almost all the doctors with “A” grades from a respectable number of Angie’s List participants are in east Scottsdale, not a heckuva lot closer than the Mayo. The very few within a reasonable driving distance don’t take Medicare assignment…which is one of the several reasons I spent some $8000 on health-related insurance and care in 2011. The Mayo doesn’t, either: this means a) whatever they choose to charge above and beyond what Medicare and its private henchmen imagine is “reasonable,” you pay out of pocket; and b) they will not accept electronic payment from Medicare or from Medigap insurers, so you have to collect an endless stream of little $20 and $30 checks, drag them to the credit union, deposit them, and then disburse those amounts one at a time to the doctor’s office. You really never have any idea how much you owe and how much Medicare or Medigap owes, so you have a constant tab that you can’t clear off the books.

It is, in short, a plan designed to keep you away from doctors. If going to a doctor weren’t aversive enough, this complicated pushmi-pullyu system effectively discourages you from seeking care, because you just don’t want to get mired in it. Especially when you’re feeling bad.

9 thoughts on “Is This EVER Gonna Go Away?”

  1. What is this coughing thing? I have it too! Thought I was almost done and back again! The over the counter things barely touch it and you are right that it lasts so incredibly long. It is miserable and contagious.

  2. @ Carol@inthetrenches: I finally got a doctor to diagnose it as bronchitis. She gave me an inhaler, which helped a little, at least with the sensation that not enough air was getting into the lungs — it’s albuterol, the fast-acting stuff they give to asthmatics — and I finally found a medico who agreed to prescribe a bottle of codeine cough medicine. The pharmacist told me codeine is the only drug that will work on this, and it did help considerably. I only had to use a couple of doses for it to quiet the truly most frantic coughing. Didn’t make the coughing go completely away, but it did make it bearable.

    SDXB has had the bug: his doctor told him it would take at least 6 weeks before the coughing would begin to subside, and he said that was just about right on.

    Try to find a doctor, a nurse practitioner, or a PA who knows you well enough to know you’re not a dope fiend, and then try to get the person to write a scrip for codeine cough syrup.

  3. @ Carol: Hope you feel better soon!

    @ Frugalscholar: The stuff must have made its way West. I’ve never had a cough like it: no cold symptoms — no sore throat, no head stuffiness. Just a cough that started in the chest and made a noise like nothing I’ve ever heard before…truly, like the rhino braying in the YouTube video! And wheezing! I’ve never wheezed in my life. And fatigue…I’m still actually sleeping through the nights, unheard of in years here at the Funny Farm. For me, the OTC meds did nothing.

    Uh oh…late for a meeting–gotta fly! Hope you’re well now. 🙂

  4. I had a cough that just wouldn’t go away (I had it for literally months) the year before last and my doctor said it might be allergies, but I insisted that it couldn’t be allergies because I’ve never been allergic to anything. I got a chest x-ray, whooping cough test and a couple of other tests. They were all negative. I decided that it wouldn’t hurt to take the allergy medicine, and, to my amazement, it worked. I haven’t had a cough since. If nothing else is working for you (and you’re not already taking stuff for allergies), it might be worth a try.

  5. @ Pat: It’s a distinct possibility. As we get older, new allergies develop. My neighbor across the street went to a pulmonologist with something similar; he said her childhood asthma had returned.

    Allergy meds that actually work either put me to sleep or wire me to the teeth. In fact, I have been known to use Chlortrimeton and Benadryl as sleeping pills. If I take Sudafed after noon, it guarantees I will not sleep at night. In the past I’ve tried some of the newer concoctions that supposedly have fewer side effects but have found they do nothing for whatever allergy is bugging me.

    Have been taking Sudafed some mornings, though. It helps a little. It’s not an antihistamine, though.

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