pneumonia: my personal experience

Okay, so you’ve probably heard of pneumonia before. It’s nothing special if you get it when you’re young, but it can cause complications for AIDS patients and the elderly, since they have weakened immune systems.  In fact, it is sometimes known as an “old man’s friend” for that reason.  Basically, it is an infection (and then inflammation) of your lungs. Some symptoms include dizziness, high fever, chills, night sweats, coughing, fatigue, and green/yellow mucous.  It is quite the unpleasant disease.

And of course, I had it.

The best part? I had it while I was a college student doing research at a hospital…in southern China. It was not the best hospital in the region, but they did have a state of the art neuroscience wing, along with some fantastic doctors.  One day, I will talk more about this hospital and my experiences there, but for now, know that I worked there one summer, doing research, and suddenly contracted pneumonia.  So, more than likely, I probably contracted this while conducting research in the facility.  Oops.

When I first realized something was wrong, I was sitting in an air-conditioned office, talking to some nurses. Mind you, it was about 97 degrees Fahrenheit on the outside world, the humidity was, luckily, staved off by the closed windows in this part of the hospital, and I was relaxing after following some doctors to other non-air-conditioned parts of the hospital.

So, it was strange for me to be shivering.

More than once, I got up out of my chair in the office to walk out to the non-AC’ed hallway just to see if it was just me, or if there was something wrong with the temperature in the hospital.  And of course, I realized – it was just me.  Something was wrong.  I ran back into the office to find the nurses and asked them, in Cantonese, “So, I’m feeling really cold, but I know it’s at least 75 degrees in this room right now…what’s going on…?”

We checked. 103 degree fever.  They told me to take the rest of the day off and rest.

When I got home, I said my “hellos” to  the “uncle” and “aunt” that I was staying with (we have extremely large “extended families” a.k.a. family friends in China) and passed out on my bed.  Then came the night sweats.  Those were THE worst.  The tossing, turning, coughing-up yellow sputum. The incessant sweat pouring out every pore in my body.  I could not sleep in my bed because my room had air-conditioning and I was feverishly cold, so I would attempt to sleep on the couch in the living room with the windows open and the humid breeze of warm air drafting through the window.  No avail.  Blankets on? Off? Fan on? Off? Sit up? Lie down? Oh, I would never wish that level of intolerable nuisances on anyone.

When I got back to do research in the hospital the next day, it was pretty obvious that I was sick. So, we ran the tests – blood samples, x-rays, listening for the distinctive crackling noise on the stethoscope – bingo. Every time I breathed in, the doctor heard a distinct crackling noise in my lung.  The only thing left was to make sure it was not tuberculosis.  Thank goodness it wasn’t.  When I told my parents (who were happily hanging out in San Francisco), they nearly had instantaneous heart attacks.  TB is not something you play around with.

Now, in the states, if someone has pneumonia, we give them a prescription and send them home on their merry way with a prescription.  Oh, not so in China.  I was on an IV for seven – yes, seven – days.  Additionally, I was also on prescription medicine.  I had to stay IN the hospital to get treated, then go home and take the medication (and drank some sort of tea that my “aunt” brought over).

The disease is not what I remember most from my experience, but it was more the recovery period.  How is it that even at a reputed hospital in China, I still had to be on an IV for seven days, whereas in the US, all I would have done is gotten a prescription for – probably – azithromycin for 5 days and have continued working/going to school? Think of how this would affect an average Chinese citizen.  If he/she contracted pneumonia, he’d then have to take off work for seven days, lose seven days’ worth of pay, just to hopefully get better.  Now, I don’t like to brag, but I’m a relatively healthy individual.  What about an older Chinese person, or a younger one with a less developed immune system.

Disease is pervasive.  It knows no social bounds, and its effects will not only affect an individual and his/her family, but will expand towards other facets of society.  Will we be able to do that?

I AM a science teacher after all…

I’d meant to post this earlier, but I ran out of time. Sorry!

Anyway, last weekend, I watched a program on NOVA called the Race to Absolute Zero. For those of you who don’t know what “absolute zero” is, it’s a completely fascinating concept! It is the LOWEST TEMPERATURE POSSIBLE! Think of the coldest thing you can imagine.  How do you know it’s cold? Does it numb and burn your hand?

Well, at absolute zero, even your atoms stop moving.  It is the absolute lowest temperature possible in the universe. So low, in fact, that we have yet to even reach that temperature! Absolute zero is 0 Kelvins (Kelvin is another way we measure temperature, like Fahrenheit and Celsius).  The coldest temperature in the universe is 3 Kelvins above absolute zero.  Okay, wait, let’s back track.  We think of things as solids, liquids, or gases.  The colder it is, the more “solid” something is.  The atoms in solids move/vibrate ever so much.  Just to completely BLOW YOUR MINDS, there’s actually other states of matter – one is plasma, and the other is called the Bose-Einstein condensate.  Plasma is like charged gas.  The Bose-Einstein condensate, however, is MORE solid than a solid, which means it’s “colder” than a solid.  Atoms move slower.  How close is this to absolute zero? 0.000000001 Kelvins.

It is so insane. At this point, matter behaves very strangely – for example, when you pour syrup out of a bottle, it is thick and “viscous” so that it takes awhile to pour.  If you pour water out of the same bottle, it isn’t quite as thick or viscous and flows easier.  IF we were to take something that was a Bose-Einstein condensate, it has NO VISCOSITY, meaning, it will continuously flow forever.  It’s more fluid than water and from what I understand, can be self-perpetuating.  I’ve got to say, that’s pretty awesome.

Okay, so how does this relate to infectious disease? Are you ready for this?

One of the first people to ever synthesize (or make) the Bose-Einstein condensate did so in 1995.  He was one of three people who received the Nobel Prize in Physics in 2001 for his discovery.  His name is Eric Cornell.  While I was watching the program, I realized that it looked like he was missing an arm.  This was a bit off-kilter to me, since physicists who work in labs tend to need to use both arms…so I looked him up on the Internet. Sure enough, he had his left arm amputated.

Why? Because in 2004, he contracted necritizing fasciitis, also known as the flesh-eating disease.

Everything comes full circle. This just goes to show you that diseases know no bounds.

the eye – just some thoughts…

I think I will start off with a picture, since a picture is worth a thousand words anyway.  Take a look:

To the right, we have a picture of one of our beloved teachers and advisors here at the iSchool. I don’t think this requires much of a description…I mean, her eye is bleeding.

Is this a symptom of a disease? How do we know? Any takers for this question? Do you think it’s transmittable? Should our little iSchool community be worried?

necrotizing fasciitis, or, the flesh eating disease…

UGH.

So, I came across this very interesting disease as I was looking around the Internet.  It’s called, “necrotizing fasciitis,” which, for you word-lovers, means “death” and “inflammation of the skin,” or, in everyday terms, it is the one and only, flesh-eating disease.  Let’s just start by talking about how gross this disease is.

First, imagine what dying skin looks like.  If you are picturing an arm with flaps of charred, blackened skin – because of course, what kind of blood is left in dying skin – hanging off of the

body, barely covering the bruised, pus-filled “skin” – if we can even call it skin – lying underneath…then you are absolutely correct!  Let’s visualize, shall we? Say you’re sick, and you accidentally cut yourself as you scrape your hand on the desk.  Unbeknownst to you, on that desk is Staphylococcus aureus, which is the same bacteria that causes a staph infection.  Unfortunately for you, your sickness leaves you very vulnerable to this bacteria, which then enters your body and begins to rapidly multiply in the wound.

Wasn’t it just a cut? Why do you suddenly feel throbbing at the wound?  And nausea.  Oops, and the dreaded diarrhea.  Hours later, the site is swollen, and lo and behold, you now have purple, blistered, pus-filled, deadened skin attached to your body.

What happened? While it is called the “flesh-eating disease,” bacteria do not actually eat away at the tissue or the skin. As with most other pathogenic bacteria, Staphylococcus aureus releases toxins which set off the immune system (the T-cells) to produce cytokines – which, apparently can kill you.  Looking at these pictures, I can see why.  Oh, and that? That was a picture of someone who is RECOVERING from this disease.  Want to see what it’s like WITH the disease before the surgery and pain? Of course you do: click here.

a warning

Welcome to the NYCiSchool’s Global Infectious Disease course blog!

To my students: As if you didn’t already have enough problems in your lives, you decided to take this course – have you not yet heard about my torturous methods from past students?  Well, unfortunately to add to your daily adolescent woes, you have now been given a heavy task: fix one of our world’s most pressing problems – global infectious disease.  This blog will serve as a platform for our discussions, research, and thoughts.  It is a place outside of the Moodle where you will be your own investigators.

Pry into the depths of the Internet. Go beyond what we can see.

And fix our world.