Background:
I'm a 30yr old Indian born male living in London from past 6yrs.
I’m a 69kg fit person and I workout a lot (probably 5-6 times a week) with no medical conditions. (Although I’ve had a sinus operation about 15 years ago, not sure if that is relevant).
History:
Since last 1.5 years (from May/June-2010) I have had hacking cough and skin urticaria (dermatographism).
Following were some symptoms I had in July/Aug-2010:
- Bad taste early morning.
- Choking and wheezing after having dinner.
- Slight pain in the chest.
- Running made everything worse.
- Cold made things worse too.
- Skin dermatographism (urticaria).
I starting visiting GP’s and NHS doctors in Sept-2010; they asked me to use their favourite drug “paracetamol” which didn’t improve anything. After a while they referred me to a chest specialist who made me try different cough syrups, nasal sprays and also did some chest x-rays, lung function tests, CT-scans of chest etc and said everything was normal. (NOTE: NHS docs did not X-rayed or scanned my skull). Eventually NHS docs in London diagnosed the problem as "sarcoidosis" which I think was a total BS, but anyways… (I can sit here and rant about NHS docs but that is pointless)
In Dec-2010 I went to Delhi (Apollo Hospital, one of the best private places). They also did number of tests but they also did a skull x-ray and said I was suffering from allergic-rhinitis and sinusitis.
They give me good medications and everything was honky dory in 2 weeks (apart from skin urticaria), I returned to London in Jan-2011 and the symptoms started to come back slowly and in a month I was back to square one!
Early this year, I gave up and just accepted that I’ll have to live with the conditions; well time and again I try to Google it and get to the bottom of it; but it seems like I’m swimming in Atlantic (no visible bottom and I keep drowning rather than identifying the cause).
Current State:
Recently, I tried to understand from Mr Google and "chronic coughs due to post nasal drip" is the one that makes the most logical sense of underlying cause of my painful 1.5 years. Over the last 3 months I’ve tried cutting out various food items, stopping the protein shakes, bought a couple of air purifiers, moved to a new house!!!!!, started taking different antihistamines and doing nasal irrigation (doing Neti using Salt and baking soda powder), and started applying vicks vaporub on my chest before sleeping every night (been doing that for almost 2 months).
Some of these things help like Neti and acrivastine antihistamine but not for long; after 2-3hrs I feel the nasal drip at the back of my throat! Vaporub helps me breathe well when I’m sleeping without which I’ll get up in the middle of the night and cough like a mad dog. The True-HEPA air-purifier from Honeywell (£150) was a waste of money.
Something tells me this forum might help me (well I’ll find out soon enough). I still have the following symptoms:
- Feeling of something dripping at the back of my throat ALL THE TIME.
- If I snort it and spit it out, it is yellowish green in colour.
- Early morning my chest feels clogged with this drip.
- Early morning chest pains.
- I cant go for my 5km runs, because it makes nasal dripping worse and makes me cough a lot.
But is this due to allergies? Is this due to something I eat? Does this problem have a name? Or is simply hay-fever and I just need to put up with it?
Is there anyone who can help?