Sick Again…or Still?

{yuck} Three or four days ago, a heavy cough developed, right out of the blue. No cold symptoms, no flu symptoms: no sore throat, no head congestion, no laryngitis, no achy muscles, no headache, no nothing. It’s a chest-wrenching, goopy cough, one of the worst I’ve ever had.

So day before yesterday I traipsed across the city to a revered physician at the revered Mayo (gotta find a doctor closer to my house!!). She opined that it’s not pneumonia, it’s not bronchitis, and it doesn’t appear to be an allergy. Her theory is valley fever.

Lovely.

She shrugged and said it most likely will go away in a week or ten days.

Right. What she’s shrugging off is the fact that I tested positive for valley fever in my early twenties. That was over 40 years ago.

Valley fever is caused by a fungus that lives in the low Southwestern deserts. It doesn’t go away. Your body may suppress the symptoms, but once the fungus has moved in, it’s there to stay. And a flare-up, years later, can develop into something very nasty, indeed.

It would explain a lot: like why, after years without so much as a sniffle, I developed a mean bug right after I took that damn triple-whammy flu shot (no more of that after this!) and have been sick off and on ever since. This started last September or October and it doesn’t seem to be going away.

So her doctorhood ordered a chest X-ray and a valley fever titer test. The results of the latter, whose reliability is questionable in the first place, won’t come back for a week or ten days.

Meanwhile, though, SDXB has developed a similar goopy cough after two months of the 10-week virus that’s been going around. He thinks what I have is the same as what he has.

However…he developed it as  part of a rhinovirus infection. In contrast, I got the 10-week respiratory bug shortly after I took a flu shot last fall. Eventually it went away. Then a few weeks later I picked up another cold. Shook that off in about 10 days, and have been feeling just fine for a while. It was completely gone and had been gone for several weeks when this new thing developed. I have no other cold symptoms: just a nasty cough.

Well. And one other odd thing: about a week before the cough appeared, I started sleeping all night!!!

It was so wonderful! Or so I thought. Suddenly, after a good ten or fifteen years of five- and six-hour nights, I’m sleeping seven hours, without waking up and watching the clock tick for two or three hours. Then it’s eight hours. Then nine hours. Then right before the cough started I slept ten hours. I haven’t slept ten hours straight since I was a teenager. On reflection, that is not normal.

Then the other evening I was walking the dog and felt a tightness in the chest, like I couldn’t breathe in enough oxygen. It passed, and I didn’t think much about it. And now this expectorant cough comes along. Pretty clearly there’s a connection; and I expect there’s some connection with the oversleeping, too.

Well. I hope this is just another virus and not valley fever, because valley fever can develop into a chronic, crippling, and life-threatening disease. The first book I edited, as a young thing, was by a pulmonologist who specialized in valley fever, and I’ll tell ya: it was real scary to read. The treatment, like chemotherapy for cancer, is about as bad as the disease. The infection or the treatment, one or the other, is likely to weaken your health permanently.

🙄 Just what I need to make my day!

Image: C. Immitis. U.S. Federal Government. Public domain.