Top Respiratory Therapist: "Why COPD Patients Cannot Sleep Lying Flat"
Lung Health Insights
Top Respiratory Therapist: "Why COPD Patients Cannot Sleep Lying Flat"
Respiratory therapist breaks ranks on why lying flat feels like going under - and the 60-second habit that got one woman back in her own bed
Registered Respiratory Therapist | 22 years clinical
Dear friend with COPD,
If lying back feels like water closing over you...
If you have not put your head on a pillow flat in months...
If there is a chair in the front room that has become the bed...
Then what follows could save you from another winter in that chair, and the room you gave up to get there.
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 Dale Reinhardt.
I am a registered respiratory therapist.
Twenty two years, the last eleven on pulmonary rehab and the floor at a hospital outside Toledo, Ohio.
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 Marguerite, I believed that the chair is simply what happens now, and that it is permanent.
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.
Marguerite 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 two 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 two 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 Marguerite'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.
Marguerite 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.
THE TWO WAYS THIS GOES
There are two versions of the next two months and both of them start tomorrow morning, in the same room, at the same hour.
THE CHAIR STAYS WHERE IT IS
Nothing changes and that is the whole of it. The blanket stays folded over the arm of the recliner because that is where the sleeping happens now, and the pillow behind the back has a dent in it that never quite comes out. The water runs at the sink for fifteen minutes every morning so that nobody in the house has to sit and listen to it, and when the phone rings it goes through to the machine and gets called back later, when the voice has come back. In March there is another appointment and they put a fourth thing on the list, and the list is the only part of this that ever gets longer. The school concert is on a Thursday at seven and the answer is already decided, it will be that it has been a long week.
THE GARDEN CENTER ON A SATURDAY
Eight weeks is not long and it is two months of mornings. The chair is still in the front room and some nights it still gets used, but the bed comes back into it and the blanket goes down to the end of the bed where it used to live. The fifteen minutes at the sink is about five and the water stays off, because there is not much left to cover up. Sentences get finished on the phone without a stop in the middle of them, and the sister on the other end notices it before anybody in the house does. Marguerite walked the whole garden center with her daughter on a Saturday in April and came out with tomato plants and a bag of bulbs, and she never sat down once, and what she told me about afterward was how full the parking lot was.
WHAT TO DO NOW
- Open the order page (the button sits right under this paragraph and it goes straight to the Veylor page, it takes about a minute)
- Put your order in (name and shipping address, and the confirmation lands in your email a few minutes later, print it if you like a paper copy)
- Watch for the amber bottle (a 2 fl oz dropper bottle, it comes in a padded envelope that fits in the mailbox, and one bottle is a month of mornings)
- Take it before your coffee (two full droppers, held a full sixty seconds by the clock and then swallowed, and every inhaler stays exactly as your doctor wrote it)
- Do not quit in week two (the second week it gets thicker and worse and around day eleven it is at its worst, and that is where most people put the bottle in a drawer, and then somewhere around day thirteen what comes up goes dark and heavy, and that is the part you kept going for)
Wild mullein is harvested, not farmed, so stock runs out.
With respect,
Dale Reinhardt
Registered respiratory therapist, 22 years
P.S. - P.S. Marguerite kept the recliner. It is still in the front room and the blanket is still over the arm of it, because her grandson sleeps there when he stays over on a Friday. She told me that on the phone last Tuesday and then she had to go, the tomatoes needed watering before it got hot.
P.P.S. - P.P.S. The mullein in this is wild and it gets cut by hand off hillsides rather than grown in rows, so there is only ever as much of it as the season gave us. When it runs out we wait for the next cut, and last spring people waited longer than we wanted them to.
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.
-
Doreen WhitlockHas anybody here actually taken this or are we all just reading the article. I drank the tea for a year and got nothing out of it so forgive me for asking. -
Pat HalloranDoreen I have, nine weeks now. Day one is bitter and week two got worse and I told my husband I was finished with it, but my daughter had paid so I kept on. Fifteen minutes at the sink is about five now. -
Lorraine PitcavageThe tea did nothing for me either, thats why I nearly didnt bother with the drops. The mornings are not the same thing anymore and I dont run the water to cover the noise now. -
Glenys Ferrierdoes anyone know how long shipping takes to new zealand, and do you take it with food or without. sorry if thats been asked already -
Raewyn BartlettGlenys mine took ten days to Nelson. First thing in the morning before you eat anything, two droppers and you hold it a full minute before you swallow. I use the clock on the stove because a minute is longer than you think. -
Colleen MabryThis is mine on the sill next to my pills so I don't forget it. Third bottle. My husband took the picture and cut half of it off.
-
Bev TanguayDay 11 here and Im honestly worse than when I started. More coming up not less and its thicker. Not sure I see the point of carrying on with this. -
Sheila BrackenburyBev that's exactly where I was and day 11 is the worst of it. Mine turned about day 13 and what came up went dark, nearly black, and heavy. Don't stop now, you've done the hard part. -
Judy LovelessKathy Vandermeer read this one, its the bit about the two years in the chair. That is you and me both and youve got the same blanket on the arm of yours. -
Marion OllerenshawIve ordered a second one for my sister in Dundee. Shes worse than me and she wont ask for anything so Im just sending it and she can argue with me after. -
Erin Vasquez-DoyleBought this for my mother in February and she's on her fourth bottle. She called me from the yard last week, which she has not done in years. Photo is her at her table.
-
Trish BallantyneI sent one to my mother in Adelaide, shes 81. She didnt want it and now she asks me if the next one has been mailed yet. She has never once said thank you either. -
Ruth Ann DelahoyHas anyone in their seventies actually done this. Everybody writing here sounds a good bit younger than me and I am 76 in October. -
Barbara SkoglundRuth Ann I'm 78. Started it in March. The stairs at my son's house are the thing I notice, I go up them now without stopping on the landing to get my breath back. -
Yvonne CharbonneauJust so people know, I tried to order in the spring and they were out and I waited nearly two months for it. Its the wild kind, they cant just make more. I got two this time. -
Nola PettigrewSame here, out of stock when I first went looking. My neighbor told me they only cut it when its in season so if its sitting there Id get it now. -
Carol TimmermanI should have got this months ago. My son said on the phone last night mom you sound like you did before and I just -
Ellen BraithwaiteTwo years I slept in that chair. Two years. If Id seen this last summer Id have the garden back by now and thats nobodys fault but mine for not looking. -
Denise KolarMine came this morning, the envelope was in the box with the water bill. Starting tomorrow before my coffee. Ill come back on here and tell you how the mornings go. -
Wendy MorelandOrdered mine last night after reading this at 2am sitting up in the chair. The cough syrup in that cabinet did nothing at all and I kept buying it anyway for two winters.
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.