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Lingering Symptoms after walking pneumonia for months

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hopslam17
hopslam17

Hey all, I wanted to share the past few months of your life to see if it compares to what I've been dealing with. 

I'm a 31 year old Caucasian male, 5'8, 220 pounds, living in Illinois, taking 75MCG of Levothyroxine daily. I don't smoke and I rarely drink (couple of times a month). Here is what I'm dealing with

09/30/2017 (I remember because it was my best friends wedding). I started feeling like I had a cold, ie: coughing, shortness of breath, lowgrade fevers. It wasn't overwhelming, but the symptoms were present daily.

Beginning of November, I go to a prompt care as my shortness of breath slightly worsened, ie: I would start coughing if I began laughing. They gave me some beginner level steroids (sadly I don't recall what) and took an x-ray. The X-ray showed a very small patch in the right part of my long which is what they used to diagnose the walking pneumonia.

Beginning of December, the steroids helped a little. I wasn't coughing when laughing/talking, but I did still have a slight chronic cough and still the occasional shortness of breath or low-grade fever. Since the symptoms were still happening, I went to my actual physician, who took another x-ray. The patch was gone, but she said my sinuses were rather red/inflamed. She stated it could likely be sinusitis. She gave me even stronger steroids and I seemed to mostly get better.

Beginning of January, I felt about 95%, but over the next week or two, the chronic cough began to come back and the occasional shortness of breath came back. Since then I've gone back to my physician (beginning of February). This time we tried saline water, flonase, and Loratadine in case it was due to post nasal drip.

Here we are tonight. The post nasal drip treatment hasn't worked. Still to this point, they symptoms aren't stopping me from living my life, ie: I work 40-50 hours a week, go to the gym 3-4 times a week (I do have some weight to lose), socialize with my friends, etc. I haven't noticed anything that triggers the chronic cough & shortness of breath. For example, my workout tonight was a little over an hour and I felt fine during the whole thing. I'm just at this point where I'm more worried about the length that this has been going on rather than the symptoms themselves. Any thoughts?

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2 Replies

  • CrimsonCrow
    CrimsonCrow hopslam17

    Posted

    Oh boy.

    You're basically describing what I went through after having pneumonia in 1996. I had symptoms like yours for a year and a half, before being diagnosed with chronic bronchitis. A few months later in mid-1998, I was hospitalized for coughing up blood...turned out what I actually had was a fungal infection, pulmonary histoplasmosis. It took three weeks in the hospital and two years of meds to get things even remotely close to better (I ended up with a lot of lung damage due to the severity of the infection, and now I have bronchiectasis).

    So, my thoughts: go back to your doctor and discuss getting checked for a fungal infection--there are several that affect the lungs--or, really, signs of any infection that might just be lingering in there.

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