As noted in my last two or three entries, I haven’t been writing much lately due to an illness in the family. My mother was in the hospital since Dec. 9 following a respiratory arrest. The medical people weren’t very optimistic about her chances at first, but God and my mother conspired to beat the odds. So she went home yesterday, 39 days after her “lung attack” (it was similar to a heart attack in many ways; in fact, her heart had stopped during the incident).

Thirty-nine days . . . . which is just shy of 40 days, recalling Jesus’s fast in the desert, Jonah’s timeline for the destruction of Ninevah, and Ezikiel’s sufferings for the sins of Judah. Yes, this incident was almost “Biblical in scope”.

The doctors never did give us a good explanation of what happened to my mother. In the end, we had to settle for the fact that the airway passages in her lungs got severely inflamed for awhile and nearly choked her. They couldn’t pin it on an infection, an environmental exposure like smoking or asbestos, or some other medical condition. I myself still think it was an autoimmune reaction. My mother never had a major immune disease (like lupus, MS, Crohn’s Disease, Guillain-Barre Syndrome, Type 1 Diabetes, etc.). However, she has had rheumatoidal arthritis for a while now; not surprising for someone in their mid-eighties. So she has had some autoimmune activity in her body.

Another little factoid from her hospital stay: on her fourth day in the intensive care unit, my mother’s blood hemoglobin levels were found to be critically low, so the doctors ordered a blood transfusion. Following medical protocol, they performed a Coombs test to search for any antibodies in her blood that might interfere with the new blood. And they found them! They asked my brother and me whether she had any previous transfusions; we and her doctor had no such recollection. The hospital where she had a cancer operation eight years ago also had no record of any transfusions. So — why all the killer antibodies in her blood? Maybe they were the same antibodies that had attacked her lungs (and her kidneys, which were also in trouble for a while there)? The doctors brushed my suggestion off, of course.

Nonetheless, there is a lot of interest today in autoimmune disease in the medical research field. Some people feel that what we presently know about autoimmune disease is just the tip of an iceberg. I.e., the medical establishment knows a lot about the most apparent autoimmune conditions (again, like lupus and MS and now arthritis), and has come up with some treatments. However, medicine is not even close to coming up with a cure; the immune system is an extremely complex thing, second only to the brain. In effect it has a “mind of its own”, as it monitors, responds and learns from changing body conditions and internal threats that come from germs and other bad stuff (including when our own cells go awry, i.e. cancer). We don’t understand it, and thus can’t do much to put it right when it makes its own mistakes.

Over the past 30 years, the government and private funders have put millions, maybe billions, into finding the cause for cancer and then finding a cure. It’s starting to seem to me that this is like a child trying to dance or ice skate before it knows how to walk. There’s something we need to get a grip on before we take on cancer, and I’m now thinking that a thorough understanding of the immune system is a big part of it. Immune disease isn’t very “sexy” right now, because it seems so limited; only a relatively small percentage of people will develop one of the known forms of serious autoimmune disease. But again, that turns out to be just the tip of the iceberg. We’re now starting to see just how tied-in the immune system is to all sorts of disease, ranging from cancer itself, to pandemic infections (i.e., immune system response is what make bird flu such a threat), to heart disease, to the aging process.

Ah yes, the aging process — that’s where my mother comes into the picture. I’m getting the feeling that many sorts of illness and breakdowns in old age are related to immune system failures, but are analyzed and treated on a more immediate, localized basis (e.g., heart condition, liver condition, lung condition, etc.). Since we are only starting to understand the immune system and what happens when age or environmental factors (toxins, pollution, smoking, viruses, etc.) mess it up, there are few or no practical therapies, never mind any cures. Most doctors probably don’t even want to talk about it (my mother’s doctors included). It’s frustrating to me, thinking that my mother has a condition that medicine is just not ready for yet.

SIDENOTE: Many of the classic autoimmune diseases are NOT old-age related; they manifest earlier in life, when the immune system is most potent. However, the control mechanisms for the immune system clearly deteriorate with age. So, if a person still has a strong immune response in their later years, as my mother does, the chance that their strength will turn against them increases.

I took a look on Google and the Amazon to see if there are any other autoimmune disciples out there. There does seem to be one; her name is Donna Jackson Nakazawa. She has a book out titled “The Autoimmune Epidemic: Bodies Gone Haywire in a World Out of Balance”. I’ve just ordered a copy of it; given my mother’s recent experience, I will give it priority over the many other interesting books stacked up in my apartment waiting to be read. The reviews and previews for Ms. Nakazawa’s book indicate that she focuses a lot on environmental factors, e.g. pollution and toxins in the air and water and our foods. She is mainly concerned about the possibility that a lot of people in their prime, and even children, are becoming weak and even sick before their time because of non-specific (and thus-far non-diagnosed) autoimmune processes triggered by these poisons.

My mother is now 86 and was fairly healthy most of her life. So, I can’t complain that the high levels of nasty stuff that we live with here in northern New Jersey prematurely robbed her of her vitality. But still, it’s a shame to think that perhaps she could have been up and kicking even longer if our industrial economy had done more to keep its noxious by-products from mucking up our planet (and if we knew how to eat the right things and avoid the wrong things so as to strengthen ourselves against it — which Ms. Nakazawa dwells on in her book).

And also if our medical establishment had not tried to jump over the immune system in its attempt to deal with cancer. Hopefully, the public and the political process will someday learn that medical researchers would do better right now by focusing on intermediate topics like the immune system; and thus stop throwing so much tax money at a problem that we just don’t have the tools yet to deal with (i.e., cancer). Let’s take a decade or two to develop those tools; that’s what make sense to me. But the researchers don’t want to say that out loud for fear of losing government and foundation grants. Oh well, such is the way of the world. I wish Ms. Nakazawa much success, but for now she seems to be a prophet crying out in the desert. Ah yes, back to the “40 days” theme!

As discussed in my last two entries, my mother is recovering, albeit slowly, from a respiratory arrest that occurred three weeks ago. About a week before that, Mom was in the hospital briefly for tests regarding her lungs. She had been experiencing coughing and breathing difficulties for some time, and my brother and the doctor wisely decided to order some tests.

However, those tests didn’t say much. My mother’s heart seemed fine, as did most of her other organs. Her chest X-ray didn’t show much, other than minor congestion. There was no indication of pneumonia or other big infection; she didn’t have a fever and her white blood cell count was normal. It probably wasn’t the flu, as she had gotten a flu shot more than a month before. So maybe it was just a minor bacterial infection. They gave her some antibiotics and let it go at that. My brother took her home and she soon seemed better.

Five days later, her breathing just stopped. And thus began her stay in the intensive care unit. The new X-rays clearly showed something — but what? Again, it wasn’t pneumonia. All the doctors could say was that her lungs were inflamed. As to the cause of that inflammation, they were rather hazy; she never smoked and had no appreciable asbestos exposure. The medical experts said that it was probably some kind of infection, even though culture tests couldn’t identify an infectious germ. So what was it?

My mother’s case is a reminder that medicine still does NOT know it all. She was not suffering from any super-rare, exotic symptoms; she was coughing and having trouble breathing. And yet, the experts cannot tell us for sure what’s going on. So what can it be? I’m not a doctor or medical researcher, but I decided to take a stupid wild-assed guess: maybe the inflammation had something to do with an auto-immune response, something akin to rheumatoid arthritis or MS or lupus (clearly my mother did not have the latter two diseases, although she has had bouts of arthritis). I did some web searches, and found out that the University of Pittsburgh is currently researching a possible connection between autoimmune attacks and lung inflammation for people with COPD (my mother was previously diagnosed with a mild form of COPD — chronic obstructive pulmonary disease — although not to the point of emphysema). They seem to have made some progress in establishing such a link.

I relayed this fact to my mother’s physician, and he told me that even if this turns out to be true and then if it actually applies to my mother, there aren’t any therapies. I then asked, “if you can’t control the autoimmune reaction, what about drugs to control the inflammation, as they have for arthritis? The doc said that nothing really exists for lung inflammation; they’ve never developed drugs specific to lung inflammation. (Steroid inhalants are sometimes used for people who smoked or have asbestos conditions, but they have many side-effects and might backfire on someone my mother’s age). This amazed me; with millions of people suffering with lung problems from smoking, pollution, asbestos, etc., the researchers and drug companies haven’t yet come across anything to specifically alleviate lung inflammation (with acceptable side-effect risks).

My quick research indicates that medical science is still in an early stage of understanding (and appreciating) inflammation, especially in the context of autoimmune responses. Given that lung tissue is extremely complex, it may be a long time until medical science fills this void. But this situation still surprises me. Sure, it’s not hard to understand why medicine is having a hard time with cancer and brain disorders, but a seemingly apparent thing like lung inflammation? Medicine may be a modern miracle, but there are still plenty of gaps in that miracle!