Poor guy. Either one is bad, but I think pneumonia might be worse. I hope you are able to take a strong antibiotic with your other issues? Regardless, you sure don’t need this right now. You know you have my prayers.
A semi amusing thing about me and pneumonia. About 15 years ago, a life long friend of mine convinced me that I needed to protect my wife and my assets with enough life insurance. He also is my insurance agent. So after putting him off as long as I could, I finally saw the wisdom in what he advised, and agreed. So, I went through all of the usual paperwork and medical testing, which I passed with flying colors, and agreed to meet him for lunch and sign the final papers. This was on a Tuesday. Of course, since he was a friend, I gave him hell about knocking me off now, and sweet talking my widow out of what was a substantial amount of money. He said that, that was his plan.
That night I had to attend a meeting and while at the meeting, I started having a terrible pain in my left upper chest. Being an EMT and in the emergency services field my entire life, I was all but positive that it wasn’t a heart attack, but it hurt so bad I strongly considered calling 911. But I toughed it out, went home, took some pills and felt better the next morning. I knew I had a torn rotator cuff in that shoulder so I figured it was coming from that. I kept using the pain pills that I had for the shoulder problem and my rotten back, and struggled on. (Remember, 15 years back they handed out hydrocodone like it was candy.)
By Friday morning I was really sick. So weak, I had to let my wife drive me to the doctor. I get in there and within 60 seconds my doc said “you have pneumonia.” I said no way. No fever, no coughing, I’ve have not even had a cold. Well, the X-ray verified it and that started a long drawn out, and scary, drama. Six months, several CAT scans, an untold number of X-rays, two surgeries, and 23 lbs lighter, I finally got better. I could just not get well and they started looking for some reason why. I remember one surgeon telling me that he was concerned that it may be lymphoma because my lymph nodes were so swollen. I said doc, I’ve been fighting pneumonia for months, they are going to be swollen. He said, not 10 times their normal size swollen. He got my attention.
Two surgeries later they determined that had sarcoidosis. An uncommon but not unheard of problem in firefighters.
Throughout this ordeal I kept giving my insurance agent/best friend the devil. I told him that I could see him cutting my brake lines, or poisoning my food or something, but I couldn’t figure out how he had orchestrated pneumonia and sarcoidosis? He said that he was a professional and that I should go ahead and die because he was tired of waiting for his money.
I need better friends.
But honestly, that mess damn near killed me. I was in excellent health and was still 10’ tall and bulletproof, or so I thought. Horsepasture, I pray that if it’s pneumonia they can knock it right out and you can get to work on healing everything else up.
