To start with, I'm thirty years old, female, asthma sufferer and with any number of allergies. Acid reflux issues are also nothing new to me. They have popped up around every other year or so since I was around fourteen. I get stressed easily.
This past fall I started coughing. When ragweed gets released into the air, it goes straight to my lungs and causes asthma symptoms rather than causing just the allergic rhinitis I get with most of my other allergens. Consequently it is one of my worst times of the year. However, this year it was much, much worse than usual. My asthma is normally mild, but this turned to moderate...and persistent!
A month later I developed bronchitis, around Thanksgiving. I had no money for a doctor's copay so I struggled thorugh it as best I could. It took three weeks for most of the symptoms to disperse and seven weeks for the cough to mostly go away. My cough was gone for about a week. Then I was struck with bronchitis again, and within a matter of days not only coughed till I nearly turned blue frequently, a massive pain in my sinuses told me that I was headed for big trouble. I scrounged up the copay money somehow and saw the doctor, and was diagnosed with both bronchitis and a sinus infection, and was put on an sulfate antibiotic, codeine, and a week's worth of advair to quell what he described as asthmatic lung spasms brought on by the bronchitis.
The worst of the cough and the sinus infection faded over time with the medicines, but the cough never went away completely. For me to have a cough for months after an illness isn't unusual, but this felt...wrong. Even with antibiotics it felt wrong. Then I started to feel a burning sensation behind my sternum, and my throat kept feeling raw and sore, and the feeling of soreness spread across my back and chest. These, again, I'd felt before, although not for a couple of years. It was stomach acid.
Usually taking something like Tums for a week gets rid of it, but when this failed to make much improvement this time, I found a store-brand version of Prilosec--Omeprazole, a fourteen-day course. After a few days on it, most of the pain, the raw feeling in the throat, etc virtually completely disappeared.
Then one morning, a week ago, I woke up feeling like something was stuck in my throat. I couldn't figure it out, and eating a meal at work caused me to regurgitate pieces of food back up to my throat when I'd have burped up gas. I could feel the acid again. Making myself vomit (once) did nothing, so I felt sure nothing was stuck. The feeling of something trapped there persisted, although the intensity of it has come and gone since that day. I haven't had the feeling of food escaping back up my esophagus since the second day, but I keep feeling like something is caught in there. I have no problems swallowing food, hard or soft, or liquids, or breathing. Nothing feels obstructed, yet something feels stuck. I should also mention that I still have a large amount of postnasal drip; it is something I often have because daily antihistamines I take are only partially effective. I won't have to blow my nose after taking them but I have huge loads of that mucus going down my throat.
Is there any advice for this? I do plan to see a doctor soon; I think this is related to GERD (from all my research it does seem so) but I'm terrified of the big C. Anxiety and depression might also be a problem here, because I haven't had a particularly strong will to live lately--but that's another issue for another time. (I will be mentioning that to the doctor as well, if I can get over my selfconsciousness enough to make myself do it.)
As an afterthought, that cough that was bothering me and hanging on with such persistence? Also almost entirely disappeared after 24 hours on Omeprazole, so it appears that stomach acid issues were irritating my asthma as well.
This discussion is related to
feeling of lump in throat.