The Diagnosis

The other day, I blogged about the health stuff I have been battling since Thanksgiving.  I am grateful for all the comments and all the support and prayers.  Thanks to the people that reached out to me.  It’s nice to know someone cares about you.

As I said in my blog, when you get diagnosed with a terminal illness, it changes a lot of the things you do in your approach to life.  I changed a few things in the way I approach life and I do not want to lose them.

I have been anxiously awaiting this morning because I was going to speak to my doctor at Mayo.

In the ensuing time, I have seen all these test results come in.  My “peanut gallery” doctors were making their own diagnosis.  I was never really worried about the diagnosis.  I was curious about the results but every single test came up negative for what they were testing for except one.  I was only worried about one thing, that whatever they diagnosed me with wasn’t idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis or wasn’t some sort of illness or condition that led me down the path to getting IPF or similar.

The good news is I don’t have IPF with 95% certainty or more.    I am good with that confidence interval!

What I do have is treatable.  It’s either:

1. Organizing pneumonia
2. Hypersensitivity pneumonitis

Interestingly in the comments on my prior blog, a person had condition number 2 and suspected I might have the same thing.

My hopes of becoming a California winemaker or world-famous cheesemaker have been dashed.  No more kombucha making at home and no fermenting of foods which I enjoyed doing.  I can’t be around a lot of yeast or mold.  The days of me doing rehabs where I am the main demolition labor are done.

When my wife and I moved to Las Vegas, we were worried about the humidity levels in our house.  We have a beautiful grand piano that we were worried about.  We ran humidifiers 24/7 to keep the humidity level up.  It was my job to fill them up.  We had one in the main room, and one in the bedroom.

It turns out, those humidifiers were likely spitting out microscopic mold spores that gave me big-time problems.

It also turns out that since Las Vegas is so dry with little to no mold around, this sort of climate is good for me.

After my wife recovered from Covid, she had a persistent morning cough we chalked up to Covid recovery. The day we got back from Mayo we tossed out the humidifiers.   As soon as we did that, her cough went away.  I used to have a dry cough in the morning too and that’s gone.  If you use humidifiers in your home, make sure you fanatically clean them or just get rid of them.

There are still opportunity costs to be paid but I am more than willing to pay them.  Like the old scene in Young Frankenstein,

This could have been a lot worse for me.

The post The Diagnosis first appeared on Points and Figures.