“I Know What it’s Like to Almost Die from Pneumonia.”

My battle with stage 4 pneumonia and How I’m staying safe during Covid-19.

Photo by CDC on Unsplash

AUTHORS NOTE: I did not get covid-19. This is my story about the time a had to fight pneumonia for my life.

It all started on a Thursday in 2018. I was in college when I started to feel a strange wave of exhaustion. I would normally get extremely tired after I’d come home from school, and I would immediately take a nap as soon as I would get home. But this was different. I developed a terrible migraine and I couldn’t stop coughing. That night, my temperature climbed to 101.1 ( yes I remember the temp)and in my mind, I was convinced I caught the worst flu ever, and I just need to go home rest it off for two weeks.

To be completely sure of what I suspected, I went to the Doctors office. She clarified that was “probably” the flu. So I took it as that.

I had had the flu a few years before, and I remembered how awful that felt so of course, I believed her. So when I went home, I drank hot tea and broth, then went to bed. That was my routine for a day and a half until I noticed my breathing started becoming labored and more and more difficult.

My mother brought me to the only urgent care that was open on a Sunday and waited for what seemed like hours in the waiting room. At this point, I had to be wheeled everywhere because if stood up, I’d lose the ability to breathe. When I was finally seen, I could tell that I wasn’t going to get the best care.

For legal reasons, I won’t mention this negligent Doctor that told my mother that my X-ray was “fabulous” prior to her seeing white mass all in and around my lungs. Personally, I think the Doctor hated the fact that my mother knew what she was looking at, and she was possibly racist ( but you can’t turn a patient away so…) She was flighty, un-tentative, and at times borderline rude.

Before I was released, I was hooked up to a saline drip to rehydrate me. At this point, it was even difficult to drink anything. My Mom had noticed that my lips were blue and my eyes were terribly sunken in. When she brought this up to a few of the nurses, they asked who has the Doctor I was seeing was and when she told them, they all looked at…