Wake up Sicky? Wait 2 Hours
One of the great things about telemedicine is that patients can literally wake up and see a doctor before they even get out of bed.
This can be a little scary on the doctor side 😉 but it’s a nice convenience for the patient.
And a lot of patients take advantage of this.
Every day I will get calls from patients and concerned parents about symptoms that someone woke up with or seem to have gotten much worse overnight.
In my experience of seeing hundreds of patients first thing in the morning, I’ve learned something that I wasn’t taught in med school:
Don’t gauge your illness based on first morning symptoms. Wait at least 2 hours.
This may sound odd, but almost everyone with upper respiratory symptoms (nasal congestion, cough, sore throat, pink eye, etc) feels worse in the morning!
Think about it.
All that snot dripped into your throat and chest all night long and so, yes, your throat is going to feel awful, and you’re going to be hacking and blowing out a lot of thick, nasty mucus. It’s all dried up and coagulated.
Same thing with pink eye. During the day, you might not have noticed a slightly watery eye because you were active and your eye was open most of the time, so it was evaporating quickly. When you go to sleep, the water and discharge accumulate, so you wake up with a crusty eye! Oh, NO!
So, I tell patients not to judge their illness by first morning symptoms.
Get up. Drink some warm fluids. Take a warm shower and hack and cough the mucus out. Do your sinus flush. Wipe the goop off your eye. And just see how you’re doing after a couple hours.
Many times people start off alarmed by the bad symptoms, but once they get going they realize that their throat isn’t too bad. Once they coughed out the nighttime goobers they find they’re actually breathing pretty well. And the eye isn’t really bothering them that much, after all.
So, try not to get too worried about how awful you feel in the morning with these things. Give it a couple hours before you call in.
The information that you are able to provide will be quite a bit more helpful for us to make a proper diagnosis.
And maybe you’ll even find that you don’t need to call in anyway!
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