My husband has had a cough since we returned from our wet camping holiday. He spent two weeks off work ill in bed, coughing and spluttering like a heavy chain smoker. This led to chest pains that I put down to his stomach muscles taking a pounding from incessant coughing.
Apart from the odd bout of Man Flu, he is rarely ill so we agreed that it was time to make the bi-annual trip to the Doctor. I felt sure that once they saw my pale-faced, dishevelled husband they would offer him something. Unfortunately, he was told he had a virus and was untreatable: “we only treat bacterial, not viral, infections.” My husband returned home clutching a bottle of Benylin and disappeared once more under his duvet. Two months later, he is still coughing. Admittedly, he is now able to go to work and the cough is probably more irritating to those around him. He has since launched himself on a fitness drive, swimming and walking the dogs at dawn, coughing his way across the fields.
Last week, the border terrorist and black Labrador puppy began coughing too. I phoned the vet and within half an hour I was sitting in the waiting room. The vet examined the dogs and without hesitation prescribed a course of antibiotics for them both. Within three days, they were cough-free and back to their usual bouncy selves.
I happened to mention the canine treatment to my husband when he got home from work that week. “WHAT?” he shrieked, in between a bout of coughing. “So the dogs get the antibiotics and I don’t,” he said. I could see his point. Our vet certainly did not seem to say it was bacterial over viral. Nor did she add that they would not work or that the liberal use of antibiotics on dogs would allow ‘multiplication of bugs that will mutate and become resistant’. Perhaps it had something to do with the approximate £6.50 I paid to the vet over the £1.7 billion cost of human antibiotics to the NHS each year.
That night, as I lay beside my husband, kept awake once more by the familiar cough, I thought of the two dogs sleeping peacefully in their baskets in the kitchen below. I wondered whether the vet could be persuaded to treat an owner for kennel cough and we might all be able to enjoy a peaceful nights sleep again.
