Respiratory Therapist Reveals: The One Thing COPD Patients Are Never Told
Lung Health Insights
Respiratory Therapist Reveals: The One Thing COPD Patients Are Never Told
Respiratory therapist breaks ranks on the one thing nine years of appointments never mentioned - and the 60-second morning habit that finally moved it
Registered Respiratory Therapist | 26 years clinical
Dear friend with COPD,
If your chest feels packed before you have even sat up...
If you cough until your eyes water and almost nothing comes...
If you have been told this is your age one too many times...
Then what follows could save you from another nine years of being managed instead of told.
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 Dana Whitfield.
I am a respiratory therapist.
Twenty six years, most of them on a pulmonary floor at a county hospital outside Erie, 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 a woman called Marlene, I believed that there is nothing left to know and nothing left to try.
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.
Marlene 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 Marlene'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 asked her to, 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.
Marlene 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.
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.”
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 VERSIONS OF THE NEXT EIGHT WEEKS
Both of these are already being paid for, one of them with money and the other one with mornings, and the second one gets picked every day by a woman who never notices she is picking it.
THE ONE WHERE NOTHING IS DIFFERENT
The blanket stays on the arm of the recliner because that is where it can be reached without getting up, and that is where ten in the morning finds her. The faucet runs the whole fifteen minutes at the sink because the water covers the sound, and nobody in that house has ever said a word about it, and she has never asked them to. The phone goes to the machine and she listens to who it was and tells herself she will call back after lunch, but lunch comes and her chest is tight and she doesnt, and the calls come less often after that. In November there is another appointment and one more thing gets added to the list, and she will take that one exactly the way it is written, same as the rest. Her son offers to drive at Christmas and she says the roads sound bad.
THE ONE THAT STARTS TOMORROW MORNING
Tomorrow morning two droppers go in before the coffee and she holds it a full minute by the clock on the stove, and it is bitter and she will not like it. The second week it gets worse and thicker and that is where the bottle usually goes into a drawer, but she already knows that part is coming so she stays on it. Around the third week the sink takes five minutes instead of fifteen, and she notices because she is back in her chair before the coffee has finished dripping. Somewhere in the fifth or sixth week she gets her end of a phone call back, and it is a small thing but it is the thing, because she is not stopping halfway through a sentence to get air. And then on a Sunday she is the one who calls her sister first, before her sister can call her.
WHAT HAPPENS NOW
- Open the order page below (its the button at the bottom of this page and it takes about a minute, and there is nothing that needs figuring out first)
- Put the order in today (name and address, same as ordering anything else, and after that it is out of your hands until it turns up)
- Watch the mail for the amber bottle (2 fl oz with the dropper built into the cap and thirty mornings in it, and its small enough to disappear behind the coffee maker if it doesnt get left out where it can be seen)
- Take it the first morning before coffee (two full droppers and a full minute by the clock on the stove before you swallow, and it is sharp and bitter and that is exactly what it is meant to taste like)
- Hold the line in the second week (somewhere around day eight it gets worse and thicker and that is where most people quit, but stay on it and what comes up goes dark and heavy around day eleven or twelve, and that is the part everyone in the comments is talking about)
Wild mullein is harvested, not farmed, so stock runs out.
With respect,
Dana Whitfield
Respiratory therapist, 26 years
P.S. - P.S. Marlene sent me a picture from the zoo and it is mostly the back of her granddaughter's head with a bit of the giraffe fence behind it, and she never mentioned her breathing once, she just wanted me to know they got the soft pretzels on the way out.
P.P.S. - P.P.S. The mullein in this is picked wild and not farmed in rows, so there is only so much of it in a season, and when a picking is gone it is gone until the next one. There is no clock on this page counting down at anybody, that is simply how a wild plant works.
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.
-
Marion HasslettHas anyone here actually taken this or are we all just reading the article. I did the tea for two months and nothing at all, and im not throwing good money after bad again. -
Glenys WarburtonMarion the tea did nothing for me either and this is not that. I started end of June and the sink used to take me fifteen minutes with the faucet running so my husband wouldnt hear, and now its about five. -
Patricia LundenHow long before anything happens because im not a patient woman and ive been let down before by things that sounded good on paper -
Roseanne TolliverPatricia the second week was WORSE and thicker and I had the bottle in the drawer ready to be done with it, but my sister said stay on it, and by day eleven what came up went brown and sank. -
Carol NyquistDoes anyone know how long the mail takes with it, and do you take it with breakfast or after. I dont want to be doing it wrong from day one. -
Beverly Ann StroudCarol mine came in six days to Ohio. First thing in the morning before you eat or have coffee, two full droppers and hold it a whole minute by the clock before you swallow. Its bitter, dont let that stop you. -
Wendy MackerethHeres mine on the sill so I see it before anything else in the morning. Day 19 today and I got up the front steps yesterday without stopping at the top.
-
Ray PetrosinoBought this for my wife Dolores, thats her on the steps. She has been at me to say something on here so here it is. She is out in the yard most mornings now and she wasnt in May.
-
Lynette BarracloughMaureen Petch read this one properly. This is the thing I was telling you about on Tuesday and dont just scroll past it the way you did with the last one -
Kathleen O'DwyerI ordered a second one for my sister in Winnipeg because she is worse off than me and she will never ask anybody for help, so its going to her whether she likes it or not. -
Amanda ReillyI got this for my mother, im 44 and she is 71 and she has never once told me she was struggling. She called me Sunday and talked about her garden for twenty minutes straight and I had to -
Colleen FitzhughSame. Sent one to my mother in Halifax and put it in the box with her birthday card so she wouldnt make a fuss about me spending on her. Three weeks in now. -
Eileen ProsserIs anyone here in their seventies actually doing this. Im 78 and everything I read seems written for people a good deal younger than me -
Marjorie VanderslootEileen im 81. Started in May. I still take my Trelegy every morning exactly the way they wrote it and I always will, this just goes alongside it. Yesterday I walked to the mailbox and back and I talked to Dot the whole way. -
Donna StiversonIm on day 9 and all thats happened is theres MORE of it than before and it tastes awful. Im not seeing what the rest of you are seeing. -
Sheila RuthvenDonna day 9 is exactly where I was and I said the same to my daughter. Give it til day 14 before you decide. Mine went dark around day 12 and I stopped being at that sink half the morning. -
Trish CallaghanJust a heads up, my friend went back to order more for her husband and they were out for a good while. Its picked wild and not grown in rows so there isnt an endless amount of it. -
Norma BeischelThey ran out on me once already and I went without for a stretch, so now I put the next one in before im down to the last few mornings in the bottle. Learn from an old woman. -
Nancy BroadwaterMy only complaint is I saw this in the spring and did nothing about it, and I sat out the whole summer on the porch watching everybody else in the yard. -
Gail HutchensMine came this morning and its sitting on the counter next to the coffee maker so I cant miss it. Starting tomorrow before the coffee like Beverly said. Ill come back on here in two weeks.
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.