My Sickness

I had a very productive summer this year, including going to Argentina for 2 weeks, going to a One Direction concert (yes I’m one of those people), and spending lots of time with friends and family doing various activities.  One of these activities included myself and my friends going on tubing rides.  Essentially you just connect your tubes to your friends’ tubes and slowly ride down the river, similar to a lazy river.  Some people (when I say that I mean most) bring a cooler with various different alcoholic beverages in them.  At the end a bus picks you and several other people up to take you back to the camping grounds.  It is a lot of fun.  We went 3 different times this summer, a couple times in June and once in July.  I wish I had some pictures to show you.  But as it was not very dry, I didn’t think bringing a camera/phone would be the smartest thing.

This is going to sound like a summery blog.  Well it’s not.  I have contracted a bad cold from these outings. It is a fungal infection that shows up in the lungs and it is not pleasant.  I bet you are wondering how I got this from being on the river?

About 3 weeks ago I saw something on the news.  They were talking about something called blastomycosis.  There has been a mini “outbreak” of 19 people (so far, not including me) with this infection that went on these river trips in the area.  They said they encouraged us to go get tested if any of us had been on that river in past few months.  Essentially it’s a fungus that can be found on the banks of rivers in the Midwest of the US however it’s a bit uncommon.  You can start seeing symptoms within 3 to 15 weeks of exposure.  Those symptoms are similar to influenza and pneumonia combined.  Sorry about the science lesson. 🙂

So I started what I thought was a small cold about 2 weeks ago and didn’t think anything of it.  My mom encouraged me to go get tested this last Friday so I did.  They took a chest x-ray, urine sample, sputum sample (which is if you don’t know, the stuff you cough up), and a blood sample.  So I got all that done.  They called me back today and confirmed that yes, this is what I have.  They finally gave me a few prescriptions for it, meanwhile I couldn’t take any medication besides just your over the counter cough medicine until I got a diagnosis.  Actually, while I was in Argentina over part of the summer I had bought some cough medicine (jarabe para la tos) and had some left over so I just used that.  That stuff is some sort of black magic. haha.

Anyway, this has kind of put a damper on my summer.  Not looking for sympathy, but these past few days I have not been able to cough up anything and it just feels like my lungs are filling up and up.  Although no one else can catch this from me, I called into work the past few days because I developed a fever.  My abs hurt so much from coughing.  I mean I could look on the bright side…at least I am working out my abs right?  🙂

Sorry for the rambling.  I hope you at least found something interesting.  If you didn’t…well…sorry bout it!

p.s: my friends didn’t even get it…

Holliexo