Coughing to the point of wretching

[Lotusbug]

I was hospitalised with the flu the middle of November (I’m an immunosuppressed asthmatic so me and the flu did not mix well!) Since then I have had a rather annoying dry cough and the need to clear my throat a lot. The problem is it’s making me wretch/almost throw up a fair few times a day now. It’s worse when I lie down and has been even worse the last week or so as I’ve caught a bit of a cold and had a blocked nose and also stepped down the dose of steroids I was discharged from hospital with.

I’ve never had the flu before so I’m not sure how long the cough should go on for and when I need to be going back to the docs but in the mean time can anyone recommend any over the counter treatments that would help suppress the cough?

You can take codeine to suppress a cough, as long as you're not taking anything else that interacts with it, but I'm not entirely convinced that that's what you should do. If when you lie down your lungs are filling with snot and phlegm and crap, and you suppress the urge to cough, you might wake up barely able to breathe at all. Happened to me once when I took codeine for a migraine while I happened to have a cold and was camping somewhere cold and damp; woke up frantic, feeling I was drowning. Any chance you could sleep propped up on lots of pillows?

Edit: if the nausea is really getting you down, you can buy Buccastem over the counter from a pharmacist (if that's okay with your medication/health), which if you're not familiar with it is an anti-sickness tablet that you poke up between your gum and your lip and allow to dissolve slowly there.

The reason I'd be nervous about suppressing the cough is that, while it feels like a dry cough, you're having to clear your throat a lot, and you're getting nausea, both of which seem like problems you'd get if you were actually producing quite a bit of phlegm. So I'd worry that suppressing the cough might do more harm than good.