I'm posting here because this is almost exactly what I'm going through just now.
I started with a cough over two months ago, just first thing in the morning. I don't smoke. Then I started getting out of breath all the time.
I didn't want to go to the doctors because mine are worse than useless. As a typical diagnosis - the last time I had gone in 2005, I had caught three colds one after the other, and been left with a hacking cough and a chest which made me sound like a ninety year old. My doctor listened to my chest and suggested that I was coughing out of habit and asked if I'd tried anti-histamines.
I sort of lost all faith after that.
Anyway, eventually the coughing and the lack of breath forced me to make an appointment. Doctor said that he thought I had anaemia because I was very pale, and asked if I thought I was pale. I'm fair haired and fair skinned with grey eyes, I don't sunbathe, so that is my normal colour. However, you never know, so off I went for a blood test and he threw in a chest x-ray as a second thought.
Both came back clear. Receptionist sounded AMAZED when I said I was still ill. I made an appointment to go back and then in despair cancelled it. This is how they make me feel. I work full time, my job is under threat of redundancy, I cannot afford wild goose chase visits to the doctors just now.
Over Xmas I was advised to try our local NHS walk in centre so feeling absolutely terrible due to coughing for about three hours non stop on Boxing Day Morning I set off for there. Wait was minimal - about an hour - and this nurse came and collected me. I explained about the cough, the bad chest, coughing up yellow mucus (sorry too much information) and being very out of breath.
She listened to my chest, agreed it was full of 'gunk' (her words) and that I needed anti-biotics. I could have cried with relief. She said she would put me on a nebuliser to see if it helped my breathing.
I had never seen one before but, what the heck. Most of the stuff seemed to come out past the mask into my eyes but behind the mask my own breath was making the air warm and moist and making me cough.
After the nebuliser stopped she said I hadn't got a chest infection, I'd got asthma, and I couldn't have anti-biotics because I hadn't got a chest infection.
I was stunned, how can you diagnose something like that with so little effort?
She then fetched something which she attached to my finger and she said that my blood oxygen was very low and she was sending me straight to A & E. While I sat there it slowly went up (the number display) and I've since found out that unless she had taken this reading before the nebuliser too it was worthless anyway since she had nothing to compare to.
I declined the trip to A & E, she refused the anti-biotics but gave me a prescription for an inhaler (which has proved useless and has no effect on me at all), and I still have a hacking chesty cough and no breath and basically I could sit and cry.
I am taking Covonia (or something) cough medicine which I bought from Boots just to give me a break from the coughing and I really do not know where to go now. I am trying to change doctors but I don't know how long it takes.
Also I take St John's Wort for depression and my doctor told me that was fine, the nurse told me I shouldn't be taking it and I should go and talk to someone about why I take it, as if I'd told her I take heroin or something. She was utterly vile.
To relieve my feelings I have sent a complaint in about her to the health authority but I really don't know where to go from here. I really think I must just buy penicillin on the internet where it is cheap and plentiful and try that since it seems the NHS doesn't care.