All the Best People Have Bad Chests

I have pneumonia.

It all started Christmas Day. I had an itchy throat and post nasal drip; so did Chris and my stepchild. They seemed to be better by the 27th, but I was getting worse. I barely controlled my coughing and asthma while watching the Aquaman sequel. I got Mucinex the next day and hoped that would do the trick.

It didn’t.

On New Year’s Eve, Chris and I were going to see the Taylor trees at Tinsel Trail. I thought the cool air would help, and it probably did, but the extra movement just made my asthma get worse and worse. (Also, by this point, I had little to no voice.) We saw the first one, which had gone viral a few weeks ago, before I started to have a coughing fit. I know this may be blasphemy to our Lord and Savior Taylor Swift, but I decided seeing the second one wasn’t worth it.

We drove back to my mother-in-law’s house in Owens Cross Roads and ate our Biggie Bags. I started to eat a cookie Chris had gotten me and promptly had a full-on asthma attack, complete with peeing on the couch and nearly vomiting. We decided that I needed to go to the ER, so we asked Laura and Kitty to take us. They graciously did.

On the way, I got a little delirious a couple of times. I don’t know if they realized what was happening. We waited 6-7 hours in the waiting room with HGTV blaring in the background. In that time, I was triaged, had labs, and went to x-ray. The nurse practitioner said it probably wasn’t asthma. It had to be something else. My lungs didn’t sound like what he expected asthmatic lungs to sound.

When I was placed in a room, the emergency room doctor disagreed and I was put on an hour long nebulizer treatment and had a dose of steroids squirted into my mouth from a needle-free syringe, which helped some. He said I could go home or, if I thought I needed it, stay for further observation. I probably should have picked observation, but I didn’t.

A couple days later, I requested a steroid dose pack from my family practitioner, and she obliged. I thought I was starting to feel better.

I was wrong.

Over the weekend, I felt like I’d pulled a muscle in my abdomen on the left side from coughing. I didn’t think that was a big deal. Just an annoying part of being a cough-prone person.

I was wrong.

On Tuesday morning, as I drove down Monte Sano after dropping off my stepchild at school, I had a sharp pain a little higher but on the side and toward my back come on suddenly. I’m surprised I could keep driving the pain was so bad, but I did. With some Tylenol, rest, ice packs, and YouTube videos, I was able to go pick them up from school that afternoon. I kept using the tools from earlier when the pain would try to take over. I was feeling better and better.

Until around 11:30 that night.

That’s when moments after applying an ice pack to my side, I had an extremely sharp pain rip through my left side. It wasn’t just a muscle pain. It was any and every kind of pain I could imagine. There was even joint pain in my left shoulder. I was nauseated and close to passing out from pain. I took my nighttime medicine, which includes Flexeril, and added some Tylenol in to see if that helped. Dad heated a blanket for me to wrap my left side in. Those remedies took the pain from a 10 to an 8. Chris and I decided that wasn’t a sustainable level of pain, and I knew I needed to find out what was going on, so I had an ambulance take me to the ER. I was given two nebulizer treatments on the way and given a weird nasal cannula thing.

Once I was in the ER and a nurse had seen me, I was given another hour long nebulizer treatment, an IV was started, and tests were ordered.

I watched ID as I breathed in even more albuterol and wondered why they hadn’t started me on fluids like was initially planned.

After the treatment ended and I was fairly certain that they weren’t going to do it unprompted, I asked about them and if they were ready for me to give a urine sample—which they’d wanted to do after my treatment. They looked at my chart and apparently saw a bunch of things weren’t being done that needed to be.

Around this time, the doctor let me know that the radiologist had said something concerning in their report about my portable chest x-ray they’d paused my nebulizer treatment for. The radiologist was focused on heart failure.

So since my symptoms could be cardiac, I have Factor V Leiden, and I have tachycardia (even though I’ve had tachycardia my whole life), he wanted a CT scan. He also wanted cardiac enzymes. The enzymes came back normal. The CT did not.

I have pneumonia.

I also have a special lobe in my right lung that only like 1% of the population has.

I also have a pleural effusion, which can cause severe pain into the shoulder, and I may have tracheobronchomalacia, which basically means my windpipe is weak and floppy. It could be from the Ehlers-Danlos, the chronic coughing, GERD, being assaulted last year, using inhaled steroids to control my asthma, or other reasons. It’s kinda scary to think about.

The emergency room doctor asked me what antibiotics I could take because I am allergic to so many of them, and he focused on how I’m allergic to penicillin/cephalosporin. I told him I knew I could take doxycycline and that was the only one I knew was safe. He got a little frustrated and said there was no guarantee that the doxycycline could kill the pneumonia. I don’t know what he wanted me to tell him. I’m not going to say, “well, if you want to send me home on medication that multiple doctors have confirmed I’m allergic to, then I’ll take it.” Maybe I’m weird but I don’t want to willingly give myself anaphylaxis. He eventually decided to try just the doxy.

So magnanimous of him.

He discharged me quickly after that and I had to ask Laura to come pick me up, which she graciously did.

Now my friends and family are having to make me rest, which they’re succeeding at because I am allowing myself to actually feel as sick as I am. I’m not ignoring it this time.