Nope, it's a dry cough.
A dry cough (in which nothing comes up from the lungs but air) is the usual aftermath of catching a cold. Depending on the severity of the infection, it can be muffled or loud, a series of short little coughs or great noisy hacks.
Other coughs that are sometimes dry: a smoker's cough in early stages of lung dysfunction or some types of asthma-related coughs.
Yes, I cough up a light (clear to pale yellow) mucus.
Mucus is the stuff that moisturizes your nose and keeps the passages clean. (You might know it as phlegm or sputum -- same stuff.) Colds and the flu tend to produce colorless or pale mucus. Sometimes there's a lot of it, which must be blown out through the nose, coughed up, or swallowed. It's a myth, by the way, that it's bad for you to swallow the gunk.
A cough with excessive mucus (of any color) most days of the month is a key feature of chronic bronchitis, the lung problem that's part of COPD.
Yes, I cough up greenish or tan phlegm.
"Green stuff" usually indicates a bacterial infection. That's why daycares and preschools usually check the color of kids' drips and forbid the green. Adults should take care, too.
Coughing up colored phlegm -- whether green, brown, or yellow -- is also a main symptom of pneumonia, a lung infection that can make a person very sick. The lungs begin to fill with fluid while fighting invaders to your system. Pneumonia usually follows another illness, which can have been started by a virus, bacteria, or fungi. (People who are over age 65 or who have a chronic lung or heart illness should consider the pneumonia vaccine, which can lessen symptoms if pneumonia develops.)
The mucus coughed up with chronic bronchitis or emphysema tends to be in the green-brown-tan family. During a COPD exacerbation -- a sudden worsening of symptoms -- the secreted mucus may get thicker, darker, and harder to cough up. That's because the airways are narrowing further.
Yes, I cough up a little red stuff.
Seeing blood (any reddish shade from pink to rust) in mucus warrants consulting a doctor. Sometimes blood-streaked mucus shows up in the smoker's cough associated with COPD. Pneumonia, tuberculosis, and lung cancer are other serious concerns producing bloodied sputum. Frothy pinkish mucus indicates pulmonary edema, an accumulation of fluid in the lungs' air sacs, which is an emergency-room situation.
