Did you know you can cough so hard that you pass out? I do now

Here is a not so fun fact. Did you know that it is in fact possible to cough so hard that you pass out?

Mark White is Editor of The News Journal.

Most of the people that I have asked that question to over the past week answered no to that question. As a matter of fact, no is the answer I would have given to that question until about one and one-half weeks ago before I ended up in the emergency room.

It started out as a nagging minor cough for the first four days before morphing into the worst cough that I have ever had in my life. It knocked me for a loop and to the point where I called in sick to work for two straight days, which is pretty much unheard of for me.

The first day that I called in sick I was coughing pretty hard, but by the second day I was coughing so hard that I was starting to wonder whether I was losing consciousness for a few seconds at a time. (This was with two cough drops in my mouth at one time mind you.)

Then that evening, I started coughing badly while eating some dinner on the couch.

The next thing I knew I had dropped food on the floor (much to the delight of my cats I’m sure…LOL) and my wife was yelling at me asking if I was OK and insisting that I go to the emergency room.

So I spent about six hours on a hospital gurney in the emergency department at Baptist Health Corbin on a Friday night getting pumped with two bags worth of IV fluid for dehydration. They told me that I had a respiratory virus that they could not do much else for, which would have to run its course.

My doctor’s office told me pretty much the same thing this past Friday when I went for a follow-up visit. They at least gave me some cough syrup.

I started feeling a little better over the weekend, but this cough is still persisting.

My thanks to the staff at Baptist Health Corbin for giving me excellent care while I was there. However, I would offer one minor suggestion to the hospital administration. If you all could get a little more padding for the buttocks area on those hospital gurneys, then I am pretty sure it would be appreciated by many of us.

My emergency room stay was better than the last one I had about 40 years ago in the old Corbin hospital. It resulted in a five-day hospital stay and two months on crutches after I got shot by a guy target shooting at an outhouse, but that is/was another column for a different day.

Speaking of illness, the News Journal has pretty much been ground zero for illness for the past couple of weeks. I don’t remember there ever being so much illness in the office at one time. Trevor Sherman is the only one, who hasn’t been sick at some point over the last couple of weeks.

The weird thing is it seems like pretty much everyone has been sick with something different too.

Between illness and the weather, we did pretty good just to get last week’s paper out the door.

I can’t wait for all of these illnesses to run their courses and go away.

Also, let me make a personal appeal to all of you, who have been praying so snow. Would you please stop already (LOL)?