Whoop whoop

I've been having this coughing/wheezing/feeling like I'm going to throw up after coughing thing for four weeks now.  I'm starting on my fifth week.  Two weeks ago I started antibiotics, and it seemed to conquer the color I was coughing up, but didn't really do anything for the cough itself.

I've been fearing it is asthma on top of an infection.  The wheezing and not being able to breathe thing is really getting annoying.  As if I don't have enough sleep problems, sometimes my coughing spells wake me up (and my husband).  Then the gag reflex gets going, and ta-da, I'm up for the next 3 hours.  Thank you, miserable sickness that could be asthma.  I don't want to carry around an inhaler with me for the rest of my life.

My lovely husband told me that there's a whooping cough outbreak in Washington.  Oh, really?  Isn't that what people had in 1857?  Didn't that girl in Little Women die of it?  Or maybe that was scarlet fever. 

I actually looked up whooping cough, and I have all of the freaking symptoms.  It says you have to catch it really early with antibiotics, or antibiotics don't do anything.  It lasts 6 weeks.  It's characterized by coughing so much that you wheeze and feel like you're going to throw up.  Infants can are more susceptible to it and can die from it, but supposedly it's rare in adults and not life-threatening in adults.

At least it's nice to know what I likely have and that it's not asthma.  2 more weeks?  What's 2 more weeks when I've been feeling this crappy for a month?  I've gotten to the point where my awful coughing feels normal, except when someone overhears it and asks if I need CPR.  Or tells me I need to leave work.  Or tells me to go to the doctor (which I DID!) & the doctor said it was just allergies.  And I've religiously been taken allergy meds to no avail in the coughing.

Lucky me contracted a disease from 1857.