Just a quick interlude into the life of someone with IPF.
I woke up about 20 minutes ago and started coughing. I'm never quite sure if I started coughing and it woke me or I just happened to start after waking up. This isn't any ordinary coughing. Imagine coughing where it seems to come from deep in your lungs and you feel it all the way up to your neck. And you just cough hard, again and again, enough that you almost can't breath. It feels like you might be trying to cough up some phlegm, but usually there is none. It's hard to tell what makes it stop. I usually end up on the couch, not moving much, sipping water. I take a bit of Robitussin-DM and that always seems to help out some. After about 15-20 minutes it seems to calm down and I can go crawl back into bed. One of my actual thoughts is that I've coughed so much I don't have the energy to cough more.
In some ways the cough is the worst part of this for me. From what I understand, people with IPF seem to be go the whole range on this issue. Some are heavy coughers like me, while some don't seem to have quite as much an issue with it. In some ways, I think the second of the two would be worse. It was the coughing that let me to the Doctor's office to have it investigated. If it wasn't for that I would have just thought I was really out of shape.
I seem to be calmed now for the most part, so I'm going to head back to sleep.
