Huh?
Exactly. WTH is that?
For as long as I can remember, I would occasionally have serious trouble swallowing food. Some foods worse than others but it could flare up anytime. The solution was just to sit there and wait it out. Skip forward 30 or 40 years to 6 years ago. Had a bad flare up that wouldn’t go away. Had a chunk of sandwich stuck halfway down and it wouldn’t move.
Went to ER and they fixed that and doctor set me up next day for an esophaguses dilation, which is where they put a long ballon down your esophagus and pump it up like they do with arteries sometimes. Worked like a charm. No problem swallowing. Doctor said however it would come back in 5 or 6 years. Route cause is acid reflux so treatment to help that was encouraged.
Okay, what does this have to do with you guys? Well, right on schedule it started again a few months ago so I had another balloon treatment a week ago. But this doctor did a biopsy because he saw no sign of damage from acid reflux. He diagnosed something called EoE. Now, one of the treatments is Flonase which is a nasal spray which I happen to use already. But this treatment is to spray it down the throat twice a day, 4 sprays at a time. I’d never heard that before so I was reading up on this and stumbled onto several studies that say regular users of steroid nasal sprays like Flonase or Flovent are very much under represented in Covid diagnosis.
I’m reading more about this but I wonder …… I know a bunch of people who’ve gotten Covid like my regular golf buddies by the way, and as far as I know I encounter the same number of people they do but I never got it. My brothers did. I traveled frequently during early days of Covid also. Could it be because I’m a regular user of Flonase, any virus I inhaled was unable to gain a foothold in my sinuses which is where Covid begins?
Not sure and I’m not suggesting all of you go get Flonase, which is over the counter, but I’m not suggesting you don’t either.
One of the studies I’ve read is below.
https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC8381621/