Feeling Breatheless?

Pneumonia is a pretty life impacting disease, and when you’ve got it you’ll know it’s serious.  It starts out with a dry cough and progresses to a wet cough, usually a productive, green-yellow, wet cough which can even have an odor to it.  Breathlessness is the big symptom.  Sometimes people don’t seek help until they’re short of breath.  They can’t get enough oxygen because the lung tissues are compromised.  They swell because of all the white blood cells moving in to combat the infection.  The membrane gets thicker in the lung and the oxygen can’t get across the membrane.  There’s one thin cell wall between the oxygen-laden air you breathe in and the red blood cells that pick it up which gets so broad that the oxygen can’t get across there to get picked up by the red blood cells.  The breathlessness is nothing mystical.  It’s just a physical distance that’s created by the swelling.

People lose their appetite during a pneumonia bout because when they don’t have enough oxygen their body knows that they don’t need to be doing anything extra like walking or doing this or that.  At the same time digesting food takes a lot of energy and a lot of blood flow to go down there and take all the enzymes and to carry the food away and to process the food in the liver.  Loss of appetite is a hallmark of pneumonia.

Then, of course, you can get aches and pains all over.  Frequently pleurisy can develop when you get pneumonia – a little fluid between the lung wall and chest wall.  That will be significant pain.  That’s not a little bit of pain, that’s sharp pain.  Usually every breath you take you know about it.  

Complications include pleurisy as well as breathing difficulties that can become so acute that you need to be hospitalized with oxygen.  Certainly if I could I’d want to do the oxygen at home.  Hey, we know that up to 18% of the people who die in the hospital die of pneumonia.  I don’t want to go there, right?  You might get another infection on top of it such as septicemia, where these bacteria wind up in the bloodstream.  The lungs are extremely thin.  They are one cell thick and a lot of times that’s a very thin cell that’s kind of spread out where there’s no nucleus or anything.  But the cell gets real thin there.  It’s fairly easy for bacteria to get into the bloodstream from the lungs.  When you’ve got bacteria circulating in the blood then you’ve got a serious life-threatening issue right then.  

Of course, I’m not advocating that someone not go to the hospital if they’re in need for medical attention.  But if all you’re doing at the hospital is sitting in a bed receiving oxygen, that could be something you can do at home and not worry about the increased risk of bacterial infections you might find at a hospital. 

We’ll talk about treatments for pneumonia next time.