Whooping Cough

After a short cold, I mysteriously started having coughing fits that would last for minutes at a time, followed by an inability to breath and nausea. The medical profession failed to correctly diagnose him, but he got on the internet and found the surprising diagnosis... Pertussis, otherwise known as Whooping Cough.

I could hardly believe it. The doctor's (three of them) all wrote it off as a virus. But I can't blame them too much, because unless you are around to hear the painful and exhausting coughing fits a whooping cough patient has, then it's hard to come up with this diagnosis. They refused to give me antibiotics (Dutch doctors would rather prescribe codeine than something that would actually help), but it probably would have been too late anyway. The actual disease sticks around for only a short time. But the damage it leaves behind is what causes the real problem and can last for months. In Chinese it's called the "100 Days Cough".

What is whooping cough? It's caused by a bacteria and you become infected by breathing in the airborne droplets of someone else who's infectious. Known mostly as a childhood disease (a falsehood), and thought to have been mostly knocked out by aggressive worldwide vaccination programs (wrong again), it's actually on the rise, and appears to engender local epidemics once ever 3-5 years. Indeed, shortly after I found out I had it, the front page of the newspaper announced there was an epidemic in The Netherlands. I'll never know where I got it, but I suspect it was at my neighbors' wedding where numerous small children were in attendance. Many parents in Holland have stopped vaccinating their children this year because there were reports that the vaccinations were either dangerous or ineffective. It's thanks to them that I got this. In children it can be deadly. In adults it's mostly just a very scary pain in the ass.

Now almost two months along, I've stopped taking codeine and am down to only several fits per day. I've managed to avoid the broken ribs some patients get from the violent coughing, but I have a perpetually sore throat no matter what I do. Otherwise I feel perfectly fine and have worked throughout the entire period.

So how do you survive this disease? There's really nothing you can do other than take a cough suppressant in the severest phase. Nevertheless, I seem to have developed somewhat of an ability to relax when I'm having a fit and stop it before it gets too bad. I usually put my palm to my chest (reflex action) and just relax. A curious side effect of this technique is that I invariably have a single sneeze every time I do this. Have yet to figure out why.