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Hi blucoyo and Happy Thanksgiving to you.
I 6 months post transplant and have been fighting coughing both before and after transplant. Coughing can be caused by many different things and diagnosing and treating a cough is hard work.
Pre=transplant I developed a bad cough and my PCP prescribed Albuterol, then later we added Flovent inhaler which is fluticasone for your lungs. That helped a little, but still left me with a lot of coughing. After that I had a regular appointment with my pulmonologist and he said we have to stop this cough and we started a very aggressive treatment. He added 50mg/day of prednisone for a month then tapered off over 6 months. He also prescribed Pulmacourt nebulizer. after about 4 months of treatment, the cough slowly improved and later stopped altogether.
<font face=”inherit”>Post transplant the cough came back. This time the high dose prednisone was not an option due to the other meds I’m taking. We added benzonatate 3X per day, Flovent, albuterol nebulizer and later lidocaine nebulizer. This all helped, but I still was coughing quite a bit. My next stop was to visit an ENT that specialized in cough treatment. When I went for the appointment, beside the doctor, there were 2 speech </font>pathologists present. The doctor inserted a scope through may nose and we did swallowing tests and various speech and sound tests.
The results were that the whole area is irritated with lots of inflammation, likely from being intubated and multiple bronchoscopies. They also found some thick areas on my vocal chords. They also told me I am not breathing enough when I speak, the pressure gets too low in my lungs and that causes a cough reflex. I will be doing some speech therapy in the coming months to learn proper breathing techniques. The doctor expects the inflammation to come down over time.
<font face=”inherit”>Besides all that, my lungs still </font>don’t<font face=”inherit”> like it when I take a deep breath or breathe hard which also causes coughing. Coughing problems can be very complex and are often multi factorial. I hope sharing my experience helps some. I hope you have a great Holiday weekend. </font>
Terry