My sister went to the doctor's office today as an emergency visit. She's got one heck of a cold but because she has had problems with both bronchitis and pneumonia in the past, things like this seem to get worse fast. Her coughing is the major concern right now. She begins to cough and can't stop. To the listener, it's horrible. She sounds like she's ready to throw up or like she can't seem to catch her breath between coughs. On top of that, she can't sleep well. She's fine sitting up in the front room on the couch but when she reclines back in her room, she starts coughing within minutes.
So, like I said, she went to the doctor's office. They're having her get a chest x-ray tomorrow to see if it is pneumonia. In the meantime, they put her on an antibiotic and a cough medicine with codeine. She came home and relaxed a bit. I think she may have gotten to doze for about an hour. She took the cough medicine and it worked...for about 20 minutes, tops. It's now 4 in the morning and she's finally dozing again. We'll see how long that lasts.
The one thing I wish is that doctors would verify first if the cause of the illness is something that an antibiotic will help. In so many cases, they prescribe one when they know it won't do a thing and all that ends up happening is filling the body up with antibiotics to the point they won't work even when they should. Resistance, y'know?
In the meantime, I'll keep doing what I'm doing, using a bit more tissues for my nose and coughing from time to time. Because I just don't want to get to the point where the one thing that might really help me out can't do its job because I've built up a resistance to it from overuse. A little bit of common sense goes a long way when it comes to being ill.
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