...I did not dodge pneumonia. I did some traveling this month for the first time since last July, and I evidently encountered some pathogen that thought my lungs looked tasty. (Make that "lung." It's just the left one.

They say it's mild, but the coughing is beyond debilitating and my doctors have not been successful in finding anything that helps at all. Any suggestions?

Also, would anybody like to read a towering stack of student work, because my grades are due on Tuesday?

Sorry you have pneumonia. That can be a ***** to get through. Try different doctors.
Hope you are better soon.

IANAD, but when I got my neumonia tge doc gave me a pill called “Factive”. Just one pill and I was pretty much over it in a day or two.

I don’t know if they still use it.

That's an interesting suggestion to try different doctors. My doctor couldn't work me in, so I had a telemedicine appointment on Monday with his partner, who I did really like. We both thought I had bronchitis, so he treated me appropriately, I thought, with steroids and antibiotics. He was personable and his instructions made sense. I followed them.

The coughing was still miserable on Thursday, so I called for different cough meds. They called some in. Quirt thought they should have leapt right to the horsekiller level of narcotics, and I wished they had, but there's a protocol. Again, the treatment was appropriate enough.

Yesterday, I said, "I'm not better. I love telemedicine as much as the next person, but I really think somebody should listen to my chest." Nobody at my doctor's office could (or would) see me, but they're associated with a hospital that has an urgent care facility. They sent me there. There was literally no other patient there, so these people were not in a hurry, but one would have thought that I had interrupted the doctor's coffee break with a hangnail.

He and the nurse listened to me breathe and did not hear pneumonia. I think he mentally checked out at that point while I was trying to emphasize how debilitating the cough was. I have not slept in days. I'm not a person to press, which has not always stood me in good stead, but I did press.

He asked if I'd like a steroid shot. I said, "Sure!" I asked him what we were going to do about the cough and, though I never mentioned opiates, I had the distinct impression that he thought I was drug-seeking. He did give me prescription for codeine tablets, plus an antitussive that Quirt had used, but I truly felt that he thought I was making a big deal out of nothing. Finally, he said, "If you want an x-ray, I'll order one," making me feel like a hypochondriac being placated." His receptionist couldn't be bothered to help me figure out where to take the x-ray order, which resulted in me walking about a mile around a hospital in a debilitated state, trying to find out where I was supposed to be.

Two hours later, his nurse called and said, and I quote: "I need to talk to you about the results of the x-ray. It shows a little pneumonia. He's called you in an antibiotic. Then she prepared to hang up but I stopped her long enough to say, "Wait! Wait! Do I keep taking the antibiotic I'm on?" He was sitting right there, because I heard him mumble something and she said, "Yeah, finish it out tomorrow." And that was it. No instructions on how to care for myself. No followup appointment. No instructions on what would trigger a trip to the ER. Nada.

I called my doctor's office who at first didn't seem to want to take my case back. "Just follow his release instructions."

Me: "THERE WERE NO RELEASE INSTRUCTIONS."

They decided to take me back.

Finally, today, I feel like somebody's paying attention. To accomplish this, I had to get the nurse on the phone, describe my symptoms in excruciating detail, state baldly that I was not a drug-seeker, and tell her that we needed a plan that didn't involve me calling an ambulance on Saturday night because I was coughing too hard to get myself to the hospital. (Quirt's out of town, monitoring my condition constantly by phone.)

This worked, as I will be picking up narcotic cough medicine potent enough to down Secretariat in an hour or two.

Here's my question. I am a sixty-year-old woman with a chest x-ray that shows a mild but real partial collapse of my left lung. How sick or how old does one have to be, exactly, to elicit any concern whatsoever from the people being paid to give care?

What happens to people who are unable to advocate for themselves? I'm sure it's not good.

This is horrible and inexcusable. I am royally P.O.ed on your behalf. I would be finding a different primary care doctor who actually responds in a situation like this.

I have had pneumonia 4x. The last time, it lasted for six months. It usually started as bronchitis then went down into my lungs. A z-pack usually got me on the road to healing. Obviously, if anti-biotics are not showing a marked improvement in a couple of days, you either have a resistant strain, in which case you probably need to get quirt to drive you to the very best hospital within a couple of hours of where you live, or, you have a viral pneumonia and then steroids are your friend. did they give you an inhaler? insist you self-monitor with a pulse-oximeter?

if not, I would do those things.

does your doc use MyChart? If so, I would write him a direct message through my chart detailing everything that is going on and get him to make room for you in his day.

again, if he won't do that, I would find a different doctor for my primary.

so sorry you are going through this, and feel better!

As to what you can do to feel better:

inhale steam to get the crud out
drink a ton of water
get sudafed and nyquil/dayquil to make the symptoms tolerable
get a product called Olba's salve and put it on your chest in a slather. Then put a heating pad on top. Use it on your throat, too.
Nonstop hot drinks--beef bone broth is a wonderful tonic.
Inhaler for the uncontrolled coughing--demand this from your doc.
Codiene syrup--again, demand this.

The collapsed lung part really worries me. Have you googled "OK's top rated hospital" ? How far away from it are you?

OMG Mary Anna, I am so, so, so sorry to hear about this, both your illness and the completely unforgivable treatment (or lack thereof) you're receiving.

For now, focus on your health. When you get better, contact them all and give them hell.

That’s miserable, inexcusable treatment.

Can you breathe? Do you feel short of breath? Or is it the coughing that’s really getting you down? Mr. AM goes through post-cold times where he gets a cough he can’t get rid of, and codeine is his friend for those times. (Oddly enough, not since lockdown started! Imagine that)

Antibiotics won’t help if it’s viral pneumonia (not bacterial).

I hope you feel better soon.

Jesus. Sounds like a nightmare. I hope you start feeling better soon.

Wow, sorry that so much has happened to you in the last few days. Sounds like things could have easily gone side ways if you did not convince the doctor's office to care more. Glad you pulled through. Get well soon!

So sorry to hear you aren't feeling well and that you're tussling with the system.

Here's hoping you're on the mend soon....

It all sounds like beyond hell, Mary Anne. I only hope you get a (much) more competent PCP and worthwhile care from your local hospital. Based on experience, I am afraid that necessarily going it on your own (with Quirt out of town) has much to do with your beyond negligent treatment. Hoping he'll be home before long and that meanwhile you get the attention you need and deserve.

I hope you can delay your grading without any pressure - that your department is more understanding than the morons in charge of your care.

WHAT a nightmare! You poor thing.

Thanks for the sympathy and helpful suggestions, y'all. It helps.

The horse-tranquilizer-level cough syrup was life-changing. (It's hydrocodone. Strangely, codeine syrup was like water, but this stuff is magic.) I slept for hours and just generally felt much better. I'm learning that it lasts about four hours, but I have to wait eight hours to take it again. I was just jolted awake by an it's-been-four-hours paroxysm. Alas. But it gives me a nice rest.

Being the daughter of a nurse, I've got the home remedy stuff going on for comfort--a vaporizer, hot chicken broth with ginger and cayenne, cough drops, throat spray. The doctor started me on a second antibiotic, so it's getting a double-whammy if it's bacterial. I've got inhalers. The oximeter says that my blood O2 is going up and down pretty noticeably, but it's staying in an acceptable range.

It's still a miserable state of affairs, but I feel better about going into the weekend than I did yesterday morning before getting some relief from the hydrocodone.

Oh, and my teaching assistant is going to pick up the slack on the paper grading. I ordinarily do all the grading on their creative work, but I'm going to let that go this time. I have some tutorial students with major projects that I've been working on at times when I felt better, and I want to do those myself, but I'm nearly done. Somehow, it makes me feel worse to have those hanging over my head than it does to just do them.

It is both a blessing and a curse to have a job that you can literally do from your sickbed.

Wow, hope you start feeling better soon! So many of us have been free of any kind of sickness and have had less problems with allergies during the pandemic... Nasty bugs are still out there!