coughing phlemgh/mucus after quitting smoking?!
Question: Coughing phlemgh/mucus after quitting smoking?
i've quit for about 9 months after suffering from laryngitus alot, i was always ill and i stopped for a few weeks andfelt 600 times better! BUT i have done nothing but cough up mucus? had sinus
problems + now i have a cough.
I do have a cig when im out and drunk and even then its like 1 or 2.
I have sinusitus which is near enough uncureable you can just treat it really. so it may not be linked, but my phlmegh is deffo linked, my chest hurts aswell. is it normal
Answers:
Your air passages are lined with tiny little hairs that move stuff that doesn't belong in your lungs up to your throat so you can expel it. Nonsmokers don't even notice this unless they're actually sick. They just clear their throats every so often.
When you smoke, you paralyze these little hairs, and they can't get crap out of your lungs--which you are adding to by smoking. So it collects there until you cough. That's why when you smoked you coughed a lot in the morning. The hairs have started to work again. Then when you had your first cigarette you paralyzed them again and stopped coughing. It's a hallmark of a smoker that he coughs a lot in the morning.
Now that you've quit, those little hairs are not only awake but working overtime. You never gave them a chance to clear out your air passages when you smoked. So you're going to cough a lot for a while, and have a lot of phlegm to deal with. But it will get better eventually.
Don't smoke. You'll just set yourself back. A lot of people who don't want to smoke quit drinking also because those two things seem to go together. Now if you could just figure out that drinking causes you to feel lousy all the next day, you could feel great all the time!
It's normal(er)
You body is now rejecting all the crap that has been stored in your lungs. Your trachea have cells in it designed to grab all the foreign crap and move it upwards and out so it doesn't land in your lungs. The smoking kills them. After you quit, they slowly return to doing their job. They are trying to rid your body of the grossness you've ingested for 4 years.
It may stop soon, or it may never stop. You may have smoked for so long that you may already have COPD.