My life got complicated about six months or so ago when I decided to get a small bladder problem looked at by a specialist. Suddenly, I was busy with blood tests and seeing one doctor after another. We learned something had happened to me 68 years ago that caused me to have a chronic medical condition. I have lived with it all my life without knowing why I was prone to walking pneumonia and had a recurrent pain that was never diagnosed until now.

I was twelve years old in February of 1951 and by the end of the summer, I was in the hospital with pneumonia. For three months prior to that, I suffered from a very bad case of bronchitis. It was so bad that I coughed so hard that I coughed up my food that I had eaten. The coughing and vomiting were constant and severe.

After quite a while, my mother took me to emergency clinic at the local hospital in Riverside, California, but we waited a long without being seen by a doctor and went home. After a couple more months of me getting no better I had lost a lot of weight. Mom sent me on the train to my grandmother who lived some distance away in San Gabriel. After a few days, Grandma then took me to the emergency clinic at the General Hospital in Los Angeles early one morning. We sat in a huge room full of other sick people and waited to be seen. One after another, ambulances came with injured and dying people and we sat there and waited. When it became close to dinner time, we left. I assume Grandma had to go home to make dinner. At any rate, we did not go back there.

I was not with my grandparents very long. My grandfather began complaining that he was spending good money on food and it was wasted on me, because I just vomited it all back up. I don’t remember how I got back home, but I assume they put me on the train or Grandma went with me, but I was back home and still very sick.

Mom’s next attempt to heal me had me laying out in the sun where she put a mustard plaster on my chest. That did it! I began running a fever so high that I was delirious and so back to the emergency we went. This time, it appeared she was concerned, because she put me in a wheel chair and took me up front to the nurses’ station. I remember she laid me down on a bench. The rest, she told me later. I don’t remember anything until a few days later when I was obviously a little better and able to sit up. At any rate, she told me she demanded they admit me to the hospital, but even after they took my temperature and it was dangerously high, they told her that they could give me a shot of penicillin and she could bring me back the next day for another one. She said she told them she was leaving me there and that they had better admit me.

I know I was making absolutely no sense at all, and I remember feeling very strange and my brain was thinking very strange thoughts. I don’t know if they realized that I was too sick to send home or what my mother said made them do it, but they admitted me to the hospital. I don’t remember much about the first week or so. I do remember them taking me on a gurney to get chest x-rays of my chest a few times. I remember it vaguely, but only because we had to leave the main hospital and go across the way to the x-ray lab and it was drizzling outside. The cold rain felt good, so I must have still been running a high fever.

I was in the hospital for two weeks and got shots every four hours for most of that time. The nurse who took care of me said that it was a good thing I was going home when I did, because my poor butt was so black and blue from all of the injections that she could hardly find a spot where she could give me another one. One of the nurses told me that the reason they took so many x-rays was because the lower lobe of my right lung had collapsed. I really did not know what that meant, but figured it was okay if they sent me home.

Fast forward some 68 years to me at the age of 80 and having had numerous bouts of walking pneumonia, asthma, and a pain that came and went in my right side with no doctor doing anything but treating the illness and condition and doing ultrasound to see if they could find out what was causing the pain. Well, we accidentally solved that mystery by my going to a doctor about something completely unrelated and having some testing done for that. The cat scan (computed tomography scan) showed something new in my lung. The scar tissue from my first bout of pneumonia way back in 1951 had been noted a few time before then, but not what they saw this time. So, that cat scan was followed up by another one with contrast and then a combined P.E.T. scan / cat scan with contrast. Then, they sent me a lung specialist.

When I first began coughing with what was obviously bronchitis, a functional, caring parent would have taken me to a doctor. I now must learn to live with a worsening chronic condition. Not only did it give me pneumonia and almost kill me, it damaged my bronchial tubes in that right lung. The bronchial tubes and bronchi are supposed to gradually get smaller and branch into even smaller tubes. To put it simply, they don’t. they stay open and sticky, thick mucus gets in there. What has caused the pain in my right side all my adult life is that I periodically get that stuff stuck in there and it swells up and puts pressure on my pleural cavity, causing the pain they call pleurisy.

The good news is that I now have a good lung doctor and we have a plan to control this and treat it when it happens again. The other good news is that I am in a recovery program that has taught me how to look at the positive side of things and be thankful for my current life. I am actively giving service in my recovery program and volunteering in another organization. I am very involved in doing things I love to do. I keep busy with hobbies and fun activities. I stay in contact with my children and grandchildren and see them as often as I can. I live in a nice, quiet, well maintained apartment building in a safe area. My apartment overlooks a park and I have a balcony full of plants, bird feeders, and automatic water containers that attract wild birds which come there every day. In the morning, I watch the birds eating and sitting on branches grooming and fussing with each other and relish that I have a sort of personal aviary without caging any birds up. Life is very, very good.