Top Respiratory Therapist: "The Real Reason Your COPD Keeps Getting Worse"

Respiratory therapist breaks ranks on the $300-a-month routine nobody questions - and the 60-second morning habit that ended nine years of getting worse

Dear friend with COPD,

If your chest is tight before your feet are on the floor...

If you cannot get a whole sentence out without stopping in the middle of it...

If bringing anything up feels like dragging it over a rasp...

Then what follows could save you from a year of mornings like that one, another shelf of things that did nothing, and a life you keep quietly making smaller.

But I need to warn you first.

This is going to make you angry.

Because it is not complicated, and it is not new, and it is not hidden.

And before any of it, three things it is not.

It is not that the lungs got worse this year.

It is not age, and nobody on this page is going to say that word to you again.

It is not that you did not try hard enough, because there is a shelf in that bathroom that proves you did.

So why has nobody said it.

Not because anybody is hiding it.

But because nobody can bill for it.

There is no code for sixty seconds in your own kitchen, and the people who actually see it are standing over somebody at two in the morning.

Nobody writes down what they know.

And here is the part that should annoy you.

Three inhalers, taken for life, at the three hundred dollars a month one customer wrote to us about.

That is three thousand six hundred dollars a year, every year, forever.

Nobody has to hide anything to want that to continue.

They only have to keep answering a question you did not ask.

So the shelf grows.

And nothing else does.

My name is Ray Delgado.

I am a respiratory therapist.

Twenty six years, twenty of them on nights at a regional hospital outside Allentown, Pennsylvania.

I get called at two in the morning when somebody cannot finish a sentence.

I have looked at what comes out of people in a clear plastic jar under a strip light, most nights, for all of it.

And until it was my own mother, I believed that it keeps getting worse because that is simply what it does.

THE MORNING I RAN OUT OF THINGS TO SAY

It was twenty past six on a Tuesday.

I stood in the bathroom doorway with a mug of coffee going cold in my hand.

My mother had both hands on the edge of the basin. The tap was running.

She had been there eleven minutes. I know because I looked.

At the end of it she rinsed the basin and wiped it with the corner of the towel so nobody would have to see.

Then she said good morning.

Here is the part I have not got over:

Twenty six years of getting things out of people's lungs for a living.

And I did not know what to tell her.

Three inhalers. Prednisone twice. A shelf of cough medicine in every strength they make.

Every appointment added something. Not one ever took anything away.

I had nothing that was not already on that shelf.

WHAT I FINALLY WORKED OUT, AND HOW LONG IT TOOK ME

I went at it the way you go at something when it is your own family.

And then one night on a shift I was looking at a jar under a strip light, the way I have looked at a few thousand of them.

But this time I actually looked at it.

Because there were two different things sitting in that jar, and there always had been, and in twenty six years not one person had ever drawn me the second one.

And what I landed on was not complicated, and that is the part that still annoys me.

It is not that her lungs had run out of road.

It is that everything she had been given was arriving in the wrong place, and had been for nine years.

Let me show you what I mean.

THE PART NOBODY HAS EVER DRAWN FOR HER

This is the part I wish somebody would draw for every single person with this.

There is a loose wet layer sitting on top.

That is the layer a thinner works on.

And that is the layer she hauls up at the sink every morning, and it is back by the afternoon.

Underneath it there is an older layer that has gone hard and set itself onto the wall of the airway.

Think of a chimney that has not been swept in nine years.

The air still goes up the middle. It always does.

But it never touches the walls, so what is baked onto the walls does not care how much air goes past it.

And underneath both layers there are tiny hairs whose entire job is to sweep the whole business up and out.

Bury those under something that has already set and they stop.

They are not broken and they have not given up. They are pinned.

So fifteen minutes of work produces a teaspoon.

Because the work is going into the top layer, and the part that costs her the morning is welded underneath it.

WHAT ACTUALLY TAKES A LAYER LIKE THAT OFF

Think about the shower head in that same bathroom.

Nine years of hard water and it has crusted up on the inside.

And you can run water through it every morning for another nine years and it will not shift, because the water goes straight down the middle and out the end.

So you take it down and you sit it in something strong, and you leave it overnight.

Not because scrubbing is lazy. Because there is nothing to scrub. It is on the inside of the thing.

And in the morning it comes away in bits, and some of them are darker than you were expecting.

That is the whole of it, and it is three things and not one.

Something strong enough to matter. Sitting against the thing itself and not running past it. And left there long enough to do the work.

Take one of those three away and you have a shower head you have run water through.

THE THREE THINGS THAT HAVE TO BE TRUE AT ONCE

For anything to move what is actually sitting there, three things have to be true at the same time.

One. It has to be strong enough to matter.

Tea is leaves and hot water. What ends up in the cup is mostly water.

That is not an opinion about the plant. It is arithmetic about the cup.

Two. It cannot go through the stomach.

Anything swallowed meets acid, then the liver takes its cut, and whatever survives gets spread through every drop of blood in the body on its way to everywhere at once.

The airway gets whatever is left of what is left.

Three. It has to be held long enough to go in.

Two seconds and a swallow is the same as swallowing it.

Miss one of the three and you get exactly what she got for years.

Nothing.

That is why the tea did nothing.

That is why the capsules did nothing.

And that is why the cheap dropper squeezed into a glass of water did nothing, and it was never the plant.

SO WHY HAS THE INHALER NOT DONE IT

Because that is the fair question, and she is going to ask it before she gets to the end of this page.

The inhaler already goes into the airway. That is true and it is not a small thing.

And it works. It opens the tube so the air gets through, and every one of them stays exactly as her doctor wrote it, forever.

But a puff is a mist, and a mist settles on the wet layer on top.

And the wet layer is the one she hauls up at the sink, so by the afternoon whatever landed on it has gone up with it.

It never sat against the wall. Not once in nine years.

Same with the syrup. Same with the tablets. Same with the machine and the mask if there is one in that house.

Not one of them was ever aimed at the wall, because every one of them was aimed at the middle, and the middle was never what was costing her the morning.

WHAT SHE TAKES NOW

✓ It is concentrated. Not leaves in hot water. There is something in the dropper worth arriving.

✓ It goes under the tongue. Held there, not tipped down the throat, so it is not starting at the stomach.

✓ It is timed. A full sixty seconds by a clock on the wall, before food and before coffee.

All three. Every morning. That is the whole of it.

So I put a bottle on the window ledge over my mother's kitchen sink, next to the radio.

And I did not make a speech about it.

I said sixty seconds, before the coffee, and I will ring you Sunday.

She did it because I am her son, and not because anybody sold her anything.

It is called Veylor.

Wild mullein, which is the one that works on what is set on the wall, and it has to be the wild kind, because the farmed sort is grown fast and comes out thin.

Bromelain, out of pineapple stems, which is in there to break the old stuff up so it has somewhere to go.

Ginger, so the whole business keeps moving instead of sitting in her chest.

Cordyceps, which is for the part she has stopped mentioning to anybody, which is the stairs.

And a little lemon peel, because otherwise nobody keeps anything up for thirty mornings.

It is the only thing I have found that does all three at once.

It is concentrated, so there is something in the dropper worth arriving.

It goes under the tongue, so it does not take the long road through the stomach.

And it is held there for a full sixty seconds by a clock, not counted in her head, because that is how long it takes to go in.

Two full droppers, first thing, before food and before coffee.

Every prescription stays exactly as it was written. Every one of them, forever.

Nothing here replaces anything, and nothing here asks her to stop.

THE SAME DOORWAY, NINE WEEKS LATER

It was twenty past six again and I was standing in the same place with the same mug.

But the tap was not running.

And the coffee in my hand was still hot, which is how I knew before anybody said anything, because that coffee has never once been hot in that doorway.

She was at the basin about four minutes and then she came out.

And she still wiped it round with the corner of the towel, out of nine years of habit, and there was nothing on it to wipe.

She did not mention it. Neither did I.

Then she said good morning, and that was the whole of it, and it was the first morning in nine years that it was.

WHAT HAPPENS, IN ORDER, INCLUDING THE WEEK PEOPLE QUIT

Day one.

Sharp and bitter, nothing like the drops before it, and about halfway through the count a warmth comes up under the jaw.

Days three to seven.

More comes up, not less. Thicker and heavier than it was.

That is the first sign anything down there is moving at all, and it is also where people stop, because nobody tells them what it means.

Days eight to fourteen.

It goes dark. Brown going to nearly black, dense enough to sink in the basin instead of sitting on the water.

That is the week nobody expects and the only one that proves anything is happening.

Weeks three and four.

Fifteen minutes comes down to about eight, and then to about five, and she notices because the coffee is still hot.

Weeks five and six.

She gets her end of a conversation back, and the person on the other end stops asking whether she is alright.

Weeks seven and eight.

She stops working out in advance where she would have to sit.

See the thirty mornings →

THEN OTHER PEOPLE IN THE CLASS STARTED ASKING HER

It did not stay quiet.

Somebody noticed she was not at the sink as long and asked her what had changed.

She told one person.

That person told two more, and inside a month I had women I had never treated stopping me in a corridor to ask about a brown bottle.

None of it came from me.

It came from women comparing notes about their own mornings, which is the only way anything actually travels in this.

WHAT OTHER WOMEN HAVE WRITTEN IN

Carol Estes, 67, North Carolina
“I told my neighbour the whole mullein thing was nonsense, because I had done the tea years ago. I want it on record that I was wrong about the plant and right about the tea.”

Denise Karras, 71, Ohio
“Week two got worse and I nearly put it in the bin. My daughter told me to finish the bottle. Day eleven what came up was dark and it sank.”

Wendy Ashcroft, 74, Adelaide
“The sink used to be fifteen minutes. It was five this morning and the kettle had not boiled.”

Dorothy Ferrante, 79, Michigan
“My great grandson had his birthday at the park and I was there the whole thing. I had picked out a chair beforehand and never used it.”

Check Availability →

AND IF YOU ARE READING THIS FOR SOMEBODY ELSE

Because a lot of the people who write to us are not the one standing at the sink.

They are the daughter who already does all the websites, reading this at half past eleven at night with the phone on the arm of the chair.

So two things, and then I will leave it.

It can arrive without a conversation. Nobody has to be talked into anything. She just has to find a small amber bottle on the counter and be told sixty seconds before the coffee.

And the second week is going to look like it is making her worse, and she is going to ring you about it, and that is the week it is actually working.

Do not let her put it in the cabinet. That is the entire job.

NINETY DAYS, AND SHE IS MEANT TO USE THE WHOLE BOTTLE

Ninety days from the day it lands on the mat.

One bottle is thirty mornings.

And thirty mornings is far enough in to know, because the thing people notice first shows up somewhere in the second and third week, well inside one bottle.

So the window is deliberately longer than the bottle.

Nobody is deciding against a clock, and nobody has to commit to anything past the first one to find out.

If she gets to the end of those thirty mornings and nothing deep has moved, the bottle goes back, empty, and she keeps her money.

There is no form to fill out.

Nobody asks her to prove she took it, or to explain what she means by nothing moved, or offers her something else instead.

That is the whole policy and it fits in a paragraph, which is more than most of them manage.

THE PART THAT IS GENUINELY OUT OF OUR HANDS

The mullein in this is wild.

Not farmed, not grown to order.

It is cut by hand in a short window once a year, and when a run is gone it is gone until the next picking.

There is no countdown on this page and I am not going to invent a number to put in front of you.

If the page still takes an order, there is still some of it on the shelf.

WHAT IT IS ACTUALLY BEING WEIGHED AGAINST

Three thousand six hundred dollars a year.

That is the routine she is already on, at the figure one customer put in writing, and it does not stop.

Then there is the shelf. Two winters of cough medicine, the box replaced every fall whether it did anything or not, the syrup bought twice because she forgot she had one.

Nobody adds that up, because it goes out five and ten dollars at a time.

Against all of that, this is one bottle and thirty mornings.

And if it does nothing, the bottle goes back empty and she keeps her money.

So the question is not what it costs.

The question is what another year of the same shelf costs.

TWO WAYS THE NEXT TWO MONTHS GO

Both of these are ordinary and nobody is going to make a fuss over either one, but they are not the same year.

The first way, where nothing changes and nobody notices

The recliner stays where it is, because the blanket lives on the arm of it and thats where the evening happens now. The sink still takes fifteen minutes in the morning with the faucet running the whole time so that nobody in the house has to listen to it. The phone goes at ten past eleven and you look at it and let it go to the machine, and you call her back in the afternoon once your voice has settled. In March theres another appointment and they add something to the list, and you take that too, exactly as written, because you always have. And next August the recliner is still where it is and the blanket is still on the arm of it.

The second way, which starts the same and then quietly doesnt

The mornings still start at that sink and the first two weeks are worse before anything else happens, but by the third week its five minutes and you only notice because the coffee hasnt finished dripping yet. You pick the phone up at ten past eleven because you can hold your end of it now, and the call runs long and the tea goes cold on the counter beside you. You stop planning out where the benches are before you leave the house, so the groceries get done in one trip instead of two with a sit down in between. Sunday dinner is at your daughters again and the stairs are still there and you go up them anyway, slow, holding the rail. And in the fall your sister is standing at the arrivals gate in Glasgow in the same coat shes had for nine years.

Start the thirty mornings →

WHAT TO DO NEXT, IN ORDER

1. Open the order page the button below goes straight there and theres nothing to read first, its one page
2. Put the order in for thirty mornings one bottle covers thirty mornings and most of the people who write to me are already into their second before they say a word about it
3. Watch for the small amber bottle 2 fl oz with a glass dropper in the cap, in a box that fits in a kitchen drawer, and it will look smaller than you pictured
4. Take it before the coffee two full droppers, held a full minute by an actual clock and not by counting, then swallow, and every prescription you have stays exactly as written
5. Stay on it through the second week somewhere around day five it gets thicker and worse and thats the stretch almost everybody quits in, so leave the bottle by the coffee maker where you cant walk past it

Check Availability →

Wild mullein is harvested, not farmed, so stock runs out.

With respect,
Ray Delgado
Respiratory therapist, 26 years

P.S. - Denise wrote to me in her third week to say the faucet doesnt have to run as long now, and then she spent the rest of the message telling me about her daughters dog and what it did to the screen door.

P.P.S. - The mullein in this is wild, not farmed, and its cut by hand in a short window once a year, so when a run is finished theres nothing until the next picking. Im not putting a clock on this page and im not going to give you a number of bottles left. When its gone the page will just say so, and it has said so before.

P.P.P.S. - If the second week is worse, that is the week that proves it. Do not put the bottle in the cabinet. Everybody who writes in about their sixth week got through their second one first.

CommentsNewest

Add a comment…

• 
  Margaret Hollis

  Ive read this twice now and its the first time anyone has said why it keeps getting worse instead of just handing me another inhaler. But has anybody here actually taken these drops or are we all just reading

  Like · Reply · 👍6 · 5 h
• 
  Denise Karras

  I have, im on the second bottle. First week i thought id wasted my money and the second week it got thicker so i nearly stopped, but my daughter said finish the bottle and by day eleven what came up was dark

  Like · Reply · 👍9 · 4 h
• 
  Sheila Ferriss

  Mullein tea all last winter, every night, and it did nothing for me. So why would drops be any different. Im asking for real here

  Like · Reply · 👍4 · 4 h
• 
  Carol Whitcombe

  Sheila i did the tea for two winters and got nowhere with it either and i was ready to write the whole plant off, but the drops are not the same thing and for me the difference showed up in week three

  Like · Reply · 👍8 · 3 h
• 
  Pat McAllister

  How long is shipping to Ontario? And do you take it with food, i have to eat something with my morning pills or my stomach turns on me

  Like · Reply · 👍2 · 3 h
• 
  Lorraine Pike

  Pat mine took six days to Hamilton. Its before food not with, two droppers and you hold it a full minute, and i use the clock on the microwave because i kept guessing and cutting it short

  Like · Reply · 👍7 · 3 h
• 
  Wendy Ashcroft

  Day 19 here in Adelaide. Im not going to describe what came up but the sink used to take fifteen minutes in the morning and today it was five and the kettle hadnt even boiled

  

  Like · Reply · 👍6 · 2 h
• 
  Barbara Lindqvist

  JEAN WHITAKER read this one. Its the sink part i was telling you about on tuesday and i couldnt explain it right at the time

  Like · Reply · 👍3 · 2 h
• 
  Kelly Rhodes

  Thats my mother, and im the daughter that made her order it. She picked the phone up sunday and talked for forty minutes and i just

  

  Like · Reply · 👍9 · 2 h
• 
  Eileen Cross

  Ordered another one for my sister in Tulsa, she has had the same cough since before her husband died and she wont go to anything social now. Im on my third bottle myself

  Like · Reply · 👍5 · 1 h
• 
  Michelle Duquette

  Buying this for my mother, she is 74 and she stopped coming to sunday dinner because our house has the stairs. She wont order anything online herself so i do it and then just tell her its coming

  Like · Reply · 👍6 · 1 h
• 
  Ruth Aylward

  Day 6 and its WORSE. Thicker, more of it, and im up earlier than i was before i started. I dont see how thats progress. Somebody tell me im not wasteing my mornings

  Like · Reply · 👍2 · 55 min
• 
  Denise Karras

  Ruth thats exactly where i was and its the week everyone quits at, mine turned around on day eleven and went dark and heavy for about four days after that. Dont stop at six

  Like · Reply · 👍8 · 48 min
• 
  Glenys Thorne

  Im 77 in November. Is anyone here actually in their seventies and still on it, or is it all sixty year olds. I dont bounce back like i used to and id like to know before i order

  Like · Reply · 👍4 · 41 min
• 
  Dorothy Ferrante

  Im 79 and ive been on it since june. My great grandson had his birthday at the park and i was there the whole thing and never sat down, and i had a chair picked out beforehand and never used it

  Like · Reply · 👍7 · 33 min
• 
  Alan Whitfield

  Ordered for my wife. Forty one years married and she still runs the faucet in the morning so i cant hear her at that sink, and i can hear her anyway. Second bottle going in today

  Like · Reply · 👍6 · 28 min
• 
  Joan Petrides

  Just so people know, i went to order in the spring and the wild one was gone and i had to wait on it, so if its showing id get it. Its picked by hand and theres only so much of it

  Like · Reply · 👍5 · 24 min
• 
  Diane Kowalczyk

  My only complaint is i saw this in the spring and told myself id think about it, and then the whole summer went by in the recliner. Should have ordered it in march

  Like · Reply · 👍4 · 22 min
• 
  Yvonne Pettigrew

  Mine turned up this morning here in Brisbane, starting tomorrow before breakfast. Ill come back and say what happens in the second week because thats the one everybody keeps talking about

  Like · Reply · 👍3 · 19 min
• 
  Helen Marchetti

  Mine came about an hour ago and the box is smaller than i pictured. Putting it by the coffee maker tonight so i dont walk past it

  Like · Reply · 👍2 · 16 min

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Please read this part

This article is for general information and is not medical advice. Keep taking everything your doctor has prescribed. Nothing here is a replacement for it. These statements have not been evaluated by the Food and Drug Administration, and this product is not intended to diagnose, treat, cure or prevent any disease. Individual experiences vary.