Recommended by colleague and doctor. . . works!

You know how sometimes you hear about something new to you twice within just a few days? Or two entirely different people give you the same advice for treating something, and it's different than anything you've ever done before? That's what recently happened to me with Mucinex.

I don't get sick much. Granted, allergies drag me down now and then, but I press on. And a couple of times a year I get a cold, but I just take some medicine and tough it out. But once every few years something hits me and keeps me home and/or on the couch for days at a time. Well, this winter I watched as our entire school (I'm a high school teacher) came down with either: 1) strep throat, 2) the flu, or 3) bronchitis/pneumonia/etc. I figured I couldn't make it through the whole winter without catching something, as I come in direct contact with 90 students a day, and who knows how many I pass in the hall. Well, Valentine's Day brought the mucus-filled lungs.

I was coughing that cough where you feel like you're peeling the insides of your windpipe up and out. And the cough where you feel like you need to get down to about mid-chest to get under whatever mucus is clogging stuff up, but you are only succeeding in getting down to about 1/2 that far, and the mucus is staying there, causing you to rasp and make all those other unpleasant noises that drive you and everyone else nuts.

The teacher next to me in a faculty meeting suggested Mucinex. I don't spend much time perusing the medicine aisles, but I remembered the commercial (don't watch much TV either), so I decided to try it with her recommendation. It was stocked at the local Walmart (which is about the only store we have in this rural town), and it wasn't cheap, but I was feeling desperate.

My stomach doesn't take well to medicine, but it said on the bottle that the product could be administered "without regard for the timing of meals", so that was a good sign. All you have to do is take it with a full glass of water. It is a 2-color tablet, so I'm assuming one layer dissolves quickly to start relieving symptoms immediately, and the other layer slowly dissolves to provide lasting relief. You can take 1 or 2 tablets at a time, every 12 hours (not to exceed 4 tablets in 24 hours). I took 1 tablet since I'd never taken it before.

It started helping quickly. I was able to lie down and take a nap and then sleep through most of the night, so I was happy enough. Of course it didn't clear up my problem 100%, but I'd say it cut it in half. I kept taking it, and then a few days later I went to the doctor and guess what he recommended? Mucinex! It was a pretty nasty bronchitis, and I'm still at the tail end two weeks later, but I can say that Mucinex, even at 1 tablet a day (I take a bunch of medicines so I don't want to take any more than that) has really helped reduce the congestion. I coughed a lot, but it was much more productive with Mucinex, and it was easier to breathe after a few days of treatment with Mucinex.

I would definitely recommend this to those with bronchitis, and I will be keeping this as a part of my "core" medicine cabinet, since I get stuffy with allergies sometimes. It really does break the mucus up so that you can get it out of your lungs. Not that coughing is fun, but if your other choice is to try and breathe through mucus, you'd rather cough it out, trust me. Unfortunately you can't give this to kids under 12 (it says "do not use", not "ask a physician"), or I would give it to my 6 year old daughter, who now has this (although she doesn't seem to have that bad of a case, and she doesn't seem to be too affected by it, either).