u/iKeyZZZ

I wanted somewhere to share my pneumonia story so I’m hoping this is the right place. I’m 42 years old and I have a wife of 11 years and two children age 9 and seven. I’ve also been a vapor for a while now. I used to smoke cigarettes when I was young. I smoked about a pack of day at some point. I smoked a lot of weed in my life as well. But when I quit smoking in 2010, I picked up vaping I quit vaping for a little while back in 2017. But I’ve been vaping ever since. I hit it from my kids for a long time.
So I took a week off of work during the last week of May. I wanted to clean my basement because it was an absolute mess. So I have this really good industrial air blower that blows air almost like what the barbers use. And I blew out all the dirt and crumbs and crust and everything from the basement floor. But I also think that I blew out some like mouse poop or bug poop or bird droppings or something. And also my wife puts down some poisonous powder every year to get rid of the water bugs. When I was using the air blower, that stuff was coming up as well. I put on a mask for a few minutes. It was an actual real respirator. But I only left it on for a few minutes and I didn’t open any of the windows or anything.
So I woke up on May 29 with extreme pain in my right lung. It hurts so bad. But I kept vaping just a little less than usual. But it got to a point by June 3 that I had to quit vaping because it was so bad. I was having cold sweats every single time I slept. I would wake up freezing with my clothes soaked. I would have to run to the bathroom and use the hairdryer to warm myself up. Anytime I would sleep for more than four hours. I would wake up with this gigantic amount of mucus in my chest. I would cough and it would all come into my mouth. I would spit it out and it would look like this dark, thick, ugly mucus.
I kept thinking I would get better just waiting an extra day or two but I never got better. I finally went to urgent care on June 12. There was a Thursday. The next day I went and got a chest x-ray because that urgent care didn’t have one. They called me 20 minutes later and told me that they would prescribe me doxycycline and that I had pneumonia in my right lung really bad. I began taking antibiotics and I was able to complete the seven day antibiotic cycle on 19 June. Each day has gotten a little bit better and I’m finally at a point now where I feel like I’m almost completely better.
During my pneumonia, it was hard for me to draw breath. I felt very depressed. I would sleep for 11 to 15 hours a night. When I would sweat, I felt like it smelled really bad and it didn’t smell like how I usually smell when I sweat. I felt like I smelled sick. And I felt like my family wasn’t very supportive. My wife was making comments. I felt like daggers to me. For example, I lost 13 pounds and when I told her that instead of empathizing, she said OK let’s not get focused on losing weight now OK. Or when I would wake up after taking a long nap I would come out into the living room and my son will be getting upset about something on PS five and I would say and you’re so hardheaded and my wife would say I wonder where he gets that from. During this time my dog escaped from my fenced in yard that I had just paid for. We paid $7000 to fence in our yard. My dog escaped three times during my pneumonia. I literally felt like crying, and I felt like I could barely move.
If anyone has any questions or wants to talk about it, please let me know. I guess I just wanted to share a little bit of it and I took some photos and I took some notes during the time too. But my appetite is back. I feel a lot better and I hardly have any mucus left. Just a tiny little bit. But this experience has changed me and it’s changed my perspective on a lot of things. Thanks for listening if you made it all this way, I truly appreciate it.
-ikeyzzz