Chronic cough for 4 years. What is it??

I've had a chronic cough for 4 years now. It started when I was 19 when I got the flu and it effected my breathing so bad while being sick that I had to go to the hospital in the middle of the night because I couldn't breathe. Once the flu went away, my lung issues didn't. I was very overweight at the time and at first the symptoms was shortness of breath with mild exercise or smoking. I got an asthma inhaler for this, and that helped. After a while I also started coughing up phlegm daily. The coughing got worse as the amount of phlegm got worse to the point that I am basically constantly clearing my throat and coughing countless times a day. As I lost weight I no longer needed the asthma inhaler, but the chronic cough persisted and is worse than ever 4 years later. I've seen doctors, gotten taken x-rays, blood tests and tested different bronchitis and asthma inhalers with no effect. No one can figure out what is wrong with me. My doctor is hesitant to diagnose me with copd since I am so young and only smoked for 1 and 1/2 years. I've experienced Second hand smoke my whole life as both my parents smoke. I've cut gluten out of my diet to test if I could have a gluten allergy and I'm 2 weeks in and so far there's no change. I've heard it can take a while to test, so I'm going to do it for 6 months. I'm starting to think it's copd and that there's nothing that can be done. There's no test for this, so the only way to get diagnosed is the ruling out any other possible things it could be. Do you have any suggestions to what it could be?

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