Managing Editor
It began innocently enough with a cough as we approached mid-February and ended up being two of the worst weeks of my life from a health perspective.
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| This shows a sampling of some of the medications that were used by Ed Pierce to overcome pneumonia in both lungs during the last two weeks of February. PHOTO BY ED PIERCE |
But around Feb. 10, I started to develop a cough and treated it with cough syrup and taking a Nyquil pill at bedtime. Within three or four days I seemed better and was on the mend when I had my annual physical with my doctor on Valentine’s Day.
He listened with a stethoscope to my lungs and said whatever I had been experiencing earlier that week had cleared up because he couldn’t hear anything in there.
That evening my wife and I went out to a restaurant for a meal and the following day we attended a funeral at a local church for a friend who had passed away. I noticed that I had the sniffles at the church, but they didn’t seem excessive or anything out of the ordinary.
The next morning, Sunday, Feb. 16, it began to snow heavily, and both my wife and I worked outside clearing the driveway of ice and snow. I was using my snowblower and the snow was so fine as it scattered around, I could barely see a few feet in front of my face.
Then it began to rain lightly, and the moisture appeared to be frozen before it reached the ground. My coat, hat and gloves were soaked, but I had cleared the driveway of the snow.
My wife and I decided to return indoors but before we did that, as I was putting away the snowblower in the garage, I felt this weird type of chill travel from one end of my body to the other. When that has happened to me before, it’s a signal that I’m coming down with something.
By later that evening, I was in poor shape. My nose was running like a raging river, I had an uncontrollable cough, a sudden loss of appetite, and was experiencing a terrible headache. I took an extra Nyquil pill to try and regain some control of my health while I slept that night, but it didn’t work.
When I woke up on Monday, Feb. 17, I was sicker than a dog. I was still coughing, my nose was still running, and the headache was still there. But two new symptoms suddenly appeared. The first one was severe diarrhea and the second was that I could now hear the fluid building up in both of my lungs.
The pronounced wheezing was troublesome because it occurred every time that I took a breath in and then exhaled. It sounded like hitting a low note on an accordion or a moose in distress and was deeply concerning.
During all this time it was difficult to sleep through the night. I would doze off at some point but then wake myself up with a loud wheeze. I recall waking myself up one evening at 1, 2, 3 and 4 a.m. with my wheezing.
After realizing that my over-the-counter cold medicine wasn’t helping me, I called the doctor on Tuesday, Feb. 18. He was booked solid for the rest of the week, so my healthcare provider asked if I would be willing to see another doctor in the practice who had an appointment available that Thursday.
I agreed to make an appointment to see her. She examined me and after listening to my lungs with her stethoscope, she diagnosed me with Community Acquired Pneumonia. That means someone at one of the places I visited, either the restaurant or the funeral at the church, had been suffering from pneumonia and then spread it to me.
She prescribed a five-day course of antibiotics, the exact same medication that I had been prescribed over Thanksgiving, and she told me that if my pneumonia didn’t clear up by the end of the antibiotic treatment, she would prescribe another medication.
Throughout this entire ordeal, my wife wouldn’t let me go outdoors to work on the driveway when it snowed several times again and I wasn’t even allowed to take the dog outside. I felt absolutely useless.
By Day Five of the antibiotic treatment, my runny nose had stopped, my headache had subsided, and my diarrhea had gone away. But I was still coughing a great deal, and I could still hear pronounced wheezing coming from my lungs.
My doctor then prescribed a treatment for the next five days of taking two prednisone pills daily.
Those were aimed at clearing my lungs of the fluid and by the time that medication was finished, I felt better and began to think that I was on the road to recovery.
In looking back at the last two weeks of February, some irrefutable facts are hard to overlook.
When you’re old, it’s hard to ward off sickness, no matter how healthy you are. And you can’t fully appreciate good health until you become sick. <
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