I'm sorry that my lungs are too attention seeking

[burntcopper]

Fuck. Was doing the washing up, had a sneeze-cough (which is kind of a one-shot hack to get phlegm up), and mum started laying into me because it's louder and sounds worse and the coughing fits are louder and she accused me of exaggerating it for attention and it being horrible manners (yes, my mother is all about the manners and public appearances on her own level and has often over the years accused me of doing stuff for attention - she's pretty much an introvert and I'm the family extrovert, and that's even compared to my brother and dad), I protested with the fact that it's half cough, hence why it sounds horrible, you think I do this for attention and fun, and she kept going, saying my coughs are louder and nastier and she's quite familiar with them thankyou, my coughs do not sound like what they've been in the past few weeks, me yelling that you think this is fun, I've torn things with this cough, it's painful and I sometimes end up wheezing, you think I'm doing this for *attention*, and I ended up screaming at her to the point that dad came in to see what was wrong and I was crying at that stage, tried to get out of the room because she just wasn't listening and was still insisting it was bad manners and he tried to mediate a bit and it came pouring out - she's heard it my whole life, it was never this loud and I said it was because I spend most of my time in London and it being drier (parents' house is ten-fifteen minutes walk uphill from the Thames, fair bit of farming land and floodplain nearby plus river being border to oxfordshire and twee little country villages, whole area's very densely tree'd, Reading town centre where I went to school and worked for the past few years pre-London is tiny and is on two rivers and a couple of canals) and she retaliated with the fact that it wasn't like this last year.

I pointed out that I didn't live with them last year, they never heard it, as far as people at work are concerned, Heather's coughs and sneezes are like echoing gunshots, Heather's coughing fits are loud and sometimes leave her wheezing and I didn't know that they were so much louder, and there'd never been hacking, even when I was ill - I'd just always known that they were loud because they'd always had that rep all the way through school. (life in the UK started at school age, hence why I tend to have that separation) And that I'd had this for the winter last year to the point where they told me to go to the doctor's, and why I went to the doctor's this time. I asked why she thinks I made jokes about having to get a place by the river, and she thought it was just jokes. I pointed out that at times I was utterly miserable because of my lungs, no matter how much I loved London itself. And that no, I don't mention it the whole time, I make jokes about it like she does with migraines (I'd earlier yelled at her 'how about if I accused you of the migraines being for attention?') because it normally doesn't come up, it's just something I'm used to. She asked about the doctor, I told her she hadn't been able to find anything, and all the tests had come back clear, the next test is for allergies. Only suggestion was the humidifier because I'd told her about it getting worse the drier it got. Which I've always known about re:dryness, because I never had the cough when I lived at the seaside and that it's worse and more prolonged in London. Realised that the coughing fits that tore a muscle were when I'd been working for a couple of months in Bracknell in what was essentially a hermetically sealed office.

So yeah. Not fun. Still in a bit of a state like I normally am after a crying and screaming match. \o/.