We live in SW Mo (USA) and have had an unusually wet growing season. My 71-yr old husband is an avid gardener and, since we live in the country, he's digging in the dirt frequently.
Around the 1st of July I developed a deep cough that lasted 2 weeks. I wasn't sick, I just sounded bad.
Toward the end of that Jerry developed the same-sounding cough but it didn't go away. He started feeling bad & it ultimately progressed to low-grade fever, no appetite (very unusual), malaise, weight loss, shortness of breath, etc. On July 28 he saw our family dr who diagnosed him with pneumonia. He was still "on his feet" and doing some outside work so we weren't terribly concerned. He took the antibiotic, used the inhaler & progressively felt worse. In a week he was back to get another chest xray & dr visit. More agressive antibiotics were given and he was prescribed a nebulizer. After a total of 3 Xrays, 3-4 dr visits & a CT scan he was referred to a pulmonologist. The infiltrates that showed up in the CT scan looked suspicious for non-Hodgkins lymphoma so a bronchospy/biopsy were done.
This came back with some pre-cancerous lesions on the trachea & right mainstem (this will be addressed later). The pulmonologist ordered a PET scan which got cancelled because the bronchial washing was starting to grow the yeast that was finally diagnosed as Blasto.
Last Fri we went to the Infectious Disease dr who then sent him to a Dermatologist to biopsy an ugly sore that had come up on his upper arm. Results aren't in on that yet.
They want him to start Itraconozole and we're waiting for the results of the skin biopsy. His Medicare prescription plan is about to reach the limit and he'd have to pay 100% till the end of the year. On the other hand, the sore on his arm is not something that one would want to see in other places. As far as the other symptoms are concerned he's pretty much back to normal so I guess it resolved itself.
Due to an aortic aneurysm he gets yearly CT scans of the chest anyway. The infiltrates were not there in Jan, so we're thinking that the wet growing season had a part in it. Oddly, the Infectious Disease dr said not to try to figure it out, because there's no telling, and he should just live his life as usual.
Author
Topic: newly diagnosed (Read 984 times)