I Found Out Exactly What The Respiratory Therapist In My COPD Class Takes

Woman of 69 exposes what the therapist running her COPD class takes every morning - and why it is on no handout in that room

Dear friend with COPD,

If your chest is heavy before you are properly awake...

If you do the exercises, take it all as written, and it does not move...

If you have stopped mentioning the mornings because of how it sounds...

Then what follows could save you from another two years of doing everything right and getting the same morning.

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 Anne Kerrigan.

I am sixty nine and I have had this eleven years.

I do the exercises. I take every single thing exactly as it is written on the box.

And I go to a class twice a week in a room off the back hallway of the hospital.

The woman who runs it is called Doreen, she is sixty eight, and she has this herself.

And until I finally asked her a question I had been sitting on for two years, I believed that if there were anything else, the class would have said so.

THE MORNING I STOPPED PRETENDING IT WAS WORKING

It was twenty past six on a Tuesday.

I had both hands on the edge of my own basin and the tap running so that nobody would have to listen to the rest of it.

My coffee was going cold on the windowsill where I had put it down.

I had been there eleven minutes, and I know because the radio told me.

And at the end of it I rinsed the basin and wiped it round with the corner of the towel, so that when he came past he would not have to see it.

Then I said good morning to my husband like it was any other day.

Here is the part I have not got over:

Eleven years of doing every single thing I was told, exactly as I was told it.

And not one person had ever told me what was actually in the way.

Doreen had been running that room for twenty two years.

And for the first two of them she did not know what to tell me either, and she has since said so to my face, which is more than anybody in a white coat has ever done.

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

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

There was nothing in that house that was not already on that shelf.

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

So one Thursday I stayed behind after the class and I asked Doreen what she takes.

Not what she tells the room. What she takes.

And she went quiet for about a second, which is how I knew there was an answer.

Then she got a pen off the desk and drew me something on the back of a handout, and in eleven years not one person had ever drawn me that.

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

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

It is that everything I had been given was arriving in the wrong place, and had been for eleven 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.

Doreen wrote it on the back of that same handout and told me to put it on the window ledge over the sink, next to the radio.

And she did not make a speech about it.

She said sixty seconds, before the coffee, and ring me Sunday.

I did it because she has this herself, and not because anybody sold me 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 BASIN, NINE WEEKS LATER

It was twenty past six again and I was at the same basin with the radio on.

But I had not put the tap on.

And the coffee on the windowsill was still hot when I picked it up, which is how I knew before I had worked anything out, because that coffee had not been hot in eleven years.

I was there about four minutes and then I came out.

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

He did not mention it. Neither did I.

Then I said good morning, and that was the whole of it, and it was the first morning in eleven 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 MORNINGS GO FROM HERE

Nothing about the next year is decided except one thing, and that is what happens tomorrow before the coffee gets made.

THE MORNINGS STAY THE SAME

The blanket stays on the arm of the recliner because that is where it lives now, and that is where the morning ends up by about ten. The faucet runs a full fifteen minutes so nobody in the house has to listen to what happens at the sink, and then the towel goes back on the rack and the door gets opened again. The phone rings twice and it goes to the machine, and the call gets returned in the afternoon when a whole sentence will come out in one piece. In November there is another appointment and they add one more thing to the list, and next year they add another one, but the list only ever gets longer and the sink still takes fifteen minutes. Five years from now the recliner is in the same spot and so is the blanket on the arm of it.

THE MORNINGS GET SHORTER

Two droppers first thing, and week one is bitter and unremarkable, and week two is worse and thicker and that is the week most bottles go in the drawer. If it stays on the counter instead, then somewhere in the third or fourth week the fifteen minutes at the sink comes down to about five, and the towel goes back on the rack while the kitchen radio is still on the same song. By week six the other end of the phone call comes back, and the call gets answered when it rings instead of after. By week eight the day stops getting planned around where there is somewhere to sit down. Then it is an ordinary Tuesday and her sister is on the line from Scotland asking when she is coming over, and the answer is not next year again.

Start the thirty mornings →

WHAT TO DO FROM HERE

1. Open the page below it loads on a phone and there is nothing left to read once it is open, the reading is done
2. Put the order in this morning wild mullein runs out and the page says so when it has, so it is better done while it is still in front of you
3. Watch for a plain brown box a small amber dropper bottle with thirty mornings in it and nothing written on the outside of the box
4. Two full droppers, sixty seconds first thing, before food and before coffee, held there by a clock and then swallowed, and every inhaler stays exactly where it is on the counter
5. Week two it gets worse thicker and heavier than week one was, and that is the week the bottle goes in the drawer for most people, so that is the week to leave it on the counter instead

Check Availability →

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

With respect,
Anne Kerrigan
69, eleven years with this

P.S. - P.S. Doreen still hands out the same photocopied sheet at the start of every session and this is still not on it, and when I asked her about that once she said the sheet is not hers to change. She keeps her bottle in the side pocket of her bag with her keys and a roll of surgical tape, and if she has left it at home she takes it in the parking lot before we start.

P.P.S. - P.P.S. It is wild mullein, picked and not farmed, so there is only as much of it in a season as there is. When it runs out the page says so and it stays that way until the next picking, and that is the only reason I would do it this morning rather than after the weekend.

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

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• 
  Marjorie Elkins

  Has anyone here actually taken this or are we all just reading about it, because Ive bought two things off articles like this one and theyre both still sitting in the cabinet over the microwave

  Like · Reply · 👍7 · 5 h
• 
  Pat Donnelly

  I have. First week nothing much and the second week everything came up thicker and I nearly threw it out, but Ray said finish the bottle so I did, and by the end of the month I was five minutes at the sink not fifteen

  Like · Reply · 👍9 · 4 h
• 
  Eileen Bracken

  I drank mullein tea all one winter and got nowhere with it so I was ready to skip past this, but the part about the woman who runs the class taking it herself is what kept me reading to the bottom

  Like · Reply · 👍6 · 4 h
• 
  Carol Ann Duprey

  Same here, the tea box sat in my cupboard two years and did nothing at all, and the drops are not the same animal. First morning it about took the roof of my mouth off it was so bitter

  Like · Reply · 👍5 · 3 h
• 
  Sheila Mortenson

  Can somebody tell me how your actually meant to take it, do you swallow it right off or does it sit there a while first

  Like · Reply · 👍3 · 3 h
• 
  Judy Feltrin

  Two full droppers and you hold it there a full sixty seconds by a clock, I use the timer on the stove, then swallow. First thing before coffee. And my Trelegy and my Mucinex stay exactly as they were, nothing changed there

  Like · Reply · 👍8 · 3 h
• 
  Noeline Harker

  Mine took eleven days to get here to Napier and it came in a plain brown box with nothing written on the outside of it, and the bottle is smaller than I had pictured but it does go the month

  Like · Reply · 👍4 · 2 h
• 
  Bev Coughlan

  Ordered on a Tuesday and had it the next week so no trouble there. I keep mine next to the toaster because otherwise I get talking and forget it till after breakfast and then its too late

  Like · Reply · 👍3 · 2 h
• 
  Denise Ashworth

  Here it is on my windowsill next to the pill box so I dont walk past it in the morning. Ignore the state of that sill, Ive been meaning to paint it since Easter and I still havent

  

  Like · Reply · 👍6 · 2 h
• 
  Kelly Sanderson

  Thats my mom Yvonne holding hers, she made me take about six of these before shed let me put one up. Shes on day four and she says its worse than when she started and I said thats what everyone here told her would happen

  

  Like · Reply · 👍9 · 1 h
• 
  Maureen Kilbride

  Dorothy Fenn read this one all the way to the bottom. Its what you were telling me in the car coming back from your appointment and I couldnt think of the word for it at the time

  Like · Reply · 👍4 · 1 h
• 
  Glenys Tarrant

  I put in for a second one for my sister over in Perth because she asked what I was on, and I want the two of us on it before Christmas when everyone comes to us for the week

  Like · Reply · 👍5 · 1 h
• 
  Amanda Reyes

  I got this for my mother, shes 74 and shes had it nine years and she will not buy one single thing for herself, ever. I didnt tell her it was coming and she called the day it showed up to ask what she owed

  Like · Reply · 👍8 · 58 min
• 
  Ruth Bellinger

  Has anyone in their seventies actually stayed on this the whole way through. Most of what I read here is people my daughters age and my situation is not the same as theirs

  Like · Reply · 👍5 · 47 min
• 
  Estelle Marchetti

  Im 79 and Ive been on it since the spring. Im not running anywhere but I got down the driveway and back for the mail last Thursday without sitting on the step first, and that was the whole thing I wanted

  Like · Reply · 👍9 · 44 min
• 
  Barbara Lindqvist

  Day nine over here and its WORSE not better, more coming up and its darker than it was, and Im about done with the whole business if Im honest

  Like · Reply · 👍2 · 39 min
• 
  Joan Pemberton

  Barbara thats the exact week I nearly quit and its also the week it started doing something, dark and heavy is what the article said happens right about there. Give it to the end of the bottle before you decide, thats all Id say

  Like · Reply · 👍7 · 35 min
• 
  Wendy Foulkes

  Went back for a second one for my neighbor and they were out, and the page said its the wild kind and there is only so much of it going. Took me three weeks to get another so dont sit on it like I did

  Like · Reply · 👍6 · 28 min
• 
  Lorraine Beaudry

  I sat on this since March because Id already spent good money on the tea and the syrups and I didnt want another dud in the cabinet. Five months I could have had by now and my grandsons wedding was in June so

  Like · Reply · 👍8 · 22 min
• 
  Dot Ferreira

  Mine came this morning and its by the coffee pot and Im starting tomorrow before I make any. My daughter calls on Sundays so we will see how I sound to her in a few weeks

  Like · Reply · 👍4 · 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.