Is That a Light I see?

"Kontorovich told me. “Patients had been told symptoms were in their head or purely due to anxiety.” Her patients epitomize the kind whom the medical system frequently fails—by contesting the reality of their illness, sending them from specialist to specialist, loading them up with drugs without getting to the root cause."

The above was taken from a long article in The Atlantic about long-haul patients who have had COVID.  The patients vary in that many may have had a few days of illness while others were hospitalized and they are also varied in their normal health and exercise routines prior to COVID.  They got well and then they got heart and breathing and oxygen symptoms days, weeks, or months later.

My search for a cause and end to the coughing also sent me on that endless experimental trial of medicines of all types.  Side-effects were sometimes scary.  The medical community wants clear results and they get lazy or impatient when the things they have successfully tried for years fail to work on a patient.  They wonder if you are just one of those old ladies who wants attention.  "According to experts, the prevalence of hypochondria ranges from 4 percent to 7 percent in the general population, affecting both men and women equally."  So I guess if you fail to find a solution for 4 out of every 100 hundred patients, you must assume they are psychologically ill or very lonely.

My most recent doctor diagnosed Silent Gerd.  She put me on a 'proton pump inhibitor' pill which inhibits my stomach from producing acid.  She added a cough suppressant pill that I took three times a day.  After a week of this pharmaceutical diet, I documented on paper that my cough continued intensively 12 to 15 times during the day, interrupting my cooking, gardening, movie watching.  It followed with runny sinuses and never being far from a box of tissues.  I would get attacks three to four times at night waking me.  The acid reducer gave me severe diarrhea and the doctor allowed me to cut it in half and told me to go off the cough suppressant since it was not working.

After a week of exhaustion, I decided I was going to take Sominex (an over-the-counter sleep aid) and try to sleep through the night.  The first night I took it I slept like a log!  Waking not once.  The next day I had NO coughing all day.  I continued the medication but also took one Sominex for several nights after that and the coughing totally disappeared!  Sudden onset of normality?  I have stopped the Sominex and find I am sleeping reasonably well and not waking with coughing spells at all.  I go through the day and have regained better breathing (I sometimes had shortness of breath) .  My doctor will assume it is her prescriptions...but such a sudden switch after about 5 or 6 days of taking the medicine makes me wonder.  Shouldn't there have been tapering off?

And like every other hypochondriac, after reading the Atlantic article I wonder if I had contracted COVID?  I never have been tested for it.  

All I know is that I am returning to normal and looking forward to a family weekend with my children and grandchildren in two week.  Everyone here in the state (with a brain) is being vaccinated and our infection rates are dropping dramatically.  I see a light at the end of the tunnel.