Chapter 1 – The Symptoms

I have never been a very good runner. I was never very fast, not very good at sprinting, and was not winning any races. But I still liked to do it. I played sports growing up, mainly basketball through high school and enjoyed myself. I would go for runs in my 20s and would feel pretty good. The last run I remember doing and feeling like I could breathe really well was a 5K in 2008. My symptoms had gotten to the point where I was starting to wonder what was going on in the last few months of 2017. I was also wheezing occasionally while exercising. I play indoor soccer and I was having a hard time catching my breath while playing. It felt was like I was hitting a wall and couldn’t take as deep a breath as I wanted to.

The wheezing and breathlessness while exercising was enough to motivate me to go to the doctor. I saw my primary care physician and they listened to my breathing before and after performing a nebulizer treatment and…they heard improvement so I went home. I did request allergy testing because I wanted to know if I was allergic to anything. Initial results came back negative for common allergies. Some of the allergy type results were not given because of “low sample volume”. I asked my doctor about it and they gave me a recommendation to go to an allergy and asthma specialist.

At the asthma and allergy specialist they ruled out asthma and did an initial basic pulmonary function test that showed decreased pulmonary function. My FEV1 was around 65%! The doctor gave me a nebulizer treatment for 15 minutes and then another pulmonary function test which did not show improvement after the nebulizer treatment. Something was not right. The allergy doctor was stumped. She expected that my pulmonary function would be normal after the nebulizer but it wasn’t. She decided to order a chest x-ray. We had to get my breathing under control before they could perform any allergy tests. Right after my appointment, I walked over to an adjacent clinic and got a chest x-ray the same day. Two days later a nurse from the doctor’s office called me with the results of the chest x-ray. I had fluid in my right lung cavity and needed to see a pulmonologist right away to have it drained. I was shocked…and at this point is when I started to get scared.