Recovering from pneumonia

Pneumonia: Inflammation of one or both lungs with consolidation. Pneumonia is frequently but not always due to infection. The infection may be bacterial, viral, fungal or parasitic. Symptoms may include fever, chills, cough with sputum production, chest pain, and shortness of breath.

So the “severe cold” I reported here last Wednesday turned out to be something a bit more severe. I completely lost my voice on Thursday. Finally, on Friday, I pried a last-minute appointment out of my doctor, and it’s a good thing I did. Two chest X-rays revealed that I had somehow contracted pneumonia.

So, this is the sickest I’ve ever been. Not life-and-death stuff (though that would have been a different story in a different era), but nasty enough to require a three-day stay in the hospital. I just got out an hour ago, after a weekend filled with IV drips of the antibiotics doxycycline and avelox, with some prednisone thrown in for the lungs.

What’s surprising, I suppose, is that I managed two fairly routine days of blogging last Wednesday and Thursday when I was in the full grip of pneumonia, without knowing it. But now that I know it, I’ll be signing off for a few days of rest. See you later.

JD Lasica, founder of Inside Social Media, is also a fiction author and the co-founder of the cruise discovery engine Cruiseable. See his About page, contact JD or follow him on Twitter.