Yeah, a lot of us, including me, have that annoying cough from stuff dripping down out of our sinuses and collecting in our bronchial tubes. It can cause difficult breathing, too. It gets better over time, but for me is worse in colder weather and toward evening. I no longer wake up from it as much, once I'm asleep it calms down, but I may have a bit to cough up upon arising.

I guess some people have more big blobs of stuff in their nasal cavities than others.... there have been threads on here about that. But coughing a lot from nasal drippage could be a sign there is more in there than you think, as the thinner mucus builds up to try to expel the blobs. One of our members uses a WaterPik with a special nasal attachment and recommends it highly.

I hear you on the self-prescribing. With my joint pains, I did it out of desperation because I hadn't been diagnosed with anything, had been tested negatively for RA, and didn't have time to go to a doc nor the faith that they'd help me, for some reason.... so I got some pred from an online Canadian pharmacy. Not recommended, but it worked out for me. Now that I have Wegs, there is no problem getting pred, and with the amount I'm taking, currently 7mg./day, there are no joint pains. I might expect them to return if I try to taper below 5mg., based on others' experience. And some still get them with higher doses of pred.

Three years into my Wegs career, my doc has given me permission to regulate my own taper of the pred and my current immunosuppressant, which is MTX. At your stage, you are probably wise not to self-prescribe, but you are the one who lives with this 24/7 and you do get a feeling for how the meds are affecting you, so I'm glad your doc allowed you more pred when you and the Gastroenterologist felt you needed it. Many, or most, docs are not very experienced in treating Wegs, and a lot of docs do have that attitude about you following their orders, despite a possible lack of experience with the disease. I have learned so much from this forum about these meds and how they are regulated by different docs in different people's situations. This does not make me qualified to self-prescribe, necessarily, but it sure helps me to know a heck of a lot more than I would without the forum, and to be able to make suggestions or drop hints to my doc, who is not very experienced with Wegs. He is a bit of an arrogant guy, but has actually backed down and let me do things my way on several occasions. He has also been proven wrong on more than one occasion. Docs are human, too.