To be infuriated with chronic coughing in office

[Luucylu]

I am probably a bad person for saying this, but I am getting so irritated by a couple of my colleagues who seem to suffer from a chronic cough.

I know they can’t help it, but seriously, take something for it, drink water, or shut your door if you’re going to have a coughing fit and start to retch in your office.

Am I really mean or would this eventually do your head in too?

YABU maybe they do take something for it and sip water but it makes no difference

YANBU.

I see your office coughers and I raise you train sniffers.

Makes me murderous.

YABU as someone who has had lifelong asthma, you can't just 'take something' for a cough. Nor will a drink of water make it go away.

I agree at the retching point they prob need to be in a bathroom but unless it's a fake cough, there isn't much they can do

Smokers? Ex smokers? (As somebody gives up, they can develop a cough as the lungs start to expel the pollutants). Lung disease? Bearing in mind that lung cancer and COPD are disabilities, as well as asthma, to complain about it would be close to discrimination against a protected characteristic.

You could even pretend to be a nice person and be concerned they might have a condition that they need to see the GP for.

Other people’s coughing and spluttering is always annoying, but I guarantee you there’s nothing they can do about it. If a glass of water or ‘taking something’ helped, they’d do that. Nobody coughs as badly as that if they don’t have to. So YABU.

I have a dust allergy, our office is only vacuumed once a week, so when I’m there I have a cough and itchy eyes. Drinking water doesn’t lessen an allergy. There are no doors, unless I spend my working day in the toilet.

I feel your pain. My Mil has a terrible cough. She is a smoker. She can barely get through a sentence without hacking up half a lung. I feel sorry for her but it's still gross.
Can you wear ear plugs and listen to music

Totally with you.
Quite possible to have sympathy for their condition and to be seriously p**see off and wish they considered others more.

My mum coughs a lot... After recovering from oesophageal cancer. Water really doesn't touch the sides. If she could stop it she would but the alternative is choking.

Agree. Hack. Hack. Hack. Or phlegmy coughs at lunchtime. The first is an irritant. The second utterly repulsive.

I’m sure your colleagues would stop coughing if they could 🙄 I’ve got one at the moment, if just ‘taking something for it’ would make the cough go away I’m sure they would have done that by now.

DP has a chronic cough and there really is nothing he can do about it. He has coughing fits roughly every 45 mins and often ends up purple faced and retching. Water would just make him more likely to choke and he gets no warning at all that it's going to start.

The one time he did try to go to the bathroom so he didn't wake me up, he passed out while getting up, smashed his face on the side of the table and got a shard of the frame of his glasses embedded directly under his eye. He ended up in hospital getting to removed and stitched up and I woke up to a two foot pool of blood on the floor. It's not safe to try and walk away during uncontrolled coughing fits.

He is on medication to try and control the worst of it but it only does so much. I understand how annoying it can get (we both are home all day so I never get a break). Sometimes I just have to put on headphones and drown it out. I feel awful ignoring him suffering but I have to take care of myself too.

Before I was diagnosed with asthma as a child my parents used to get really annoyed with my coughing when I had a cold. They couldn’t understand why I couldn’t just have a drink and try a bit harder! Your comment brings back stressful memories of trying to stifle it in the middle of the night.

I guarantee you there’s nothing they can do about it.
Maybe true in many cases but not all - it can become a habit. Not the coughing up a lung sort, but the chronic clearing the throat type.
And why not consider others and shut the door if that option is available?

People do not cough for their own amusement.

I’m sure they used to in my office

Seen these recommended for filtering sound but not blocking.
https://www.loopearplugs.com/products/engage

I have adult onset asthma as a result of a virus (which may or may not have been covid although I did test negative). I've had it since the start of the year and have had a chronic cough which is fairly well controlled now but was truly horrendous for months. I've had steroids, antibiotics, chest x rays, ECGs, inhalers, months of recording peak flows, you name it to try and work out the cause and get it under control, but in the meantime it was so bad and I was so exhausted from constant lengthy coughing fits and paranoid about coughing like that in public that I spent the first half of the year almost in hibernation.

So no, it's probably not just a case of having a cough sweet or some water, and in an open plan office there would have been literally nothing I could do about it, and believe me no matter how irritating it is for you, it's probably nothing compared to how irritating it is for the cougher. Thankfully I work from home and was able to mute my mic in meetings.

I do get it but there's not much you can do. My old desk neighbour was a chronic throat clearer and it reached a point where I was bordering on war crimes. Every 5 minutes "hem HEM". ARGH.

I've now got a new neighbour who loudly belches all the time and coughs herself into gagging and wretching every now and then. I feel for her because it sounds painful, but I also want to remove her windpipe.

Unescorted · Today 09:11
My mum coughs a lot... After recovering from oesophageal cancer. Water really doesn't touch the sides. If she could stop it she would but the alternative is choking.
I'm not doubting that your mum coughs a lot but I think she shouldn't accept this as the norm.
We're all different but as someone who has also had oesophageal cancer that sounds like an unusual side effect . Though maybe her tumour was high up near her mouth.
Not meaning to be unhelpful, hard to post with keyboard issues here.

Okay, it’s been good to hear from other points of view which is exactly why I posted. However, I still believe that if I was the one coughing and retching this loudly, and for this long, I’d at least shut the door on my office sometimes so my colleagues didn’t have to listen to it.

Someone in our office is constantly sniffing and snorting as though they're trying to clear phlegm. That's disgusting and annoying

What precisely do you think they could do about it “if they considered others more”?

Shut the door on their office.