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.<\/p>\n
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.<\/p>\n
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?<\/p>\n
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<\/a> (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.<\/p>\n 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). <\/p>\n 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!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[32],"tags":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=228"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4630,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/228\/revisions\/4630"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=228"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=228"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/jimgworld.com\/blog1\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=228"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}