To explain the last part first, I live in southeastern Pennsylvania where we are under a few feet of snow from a blizzard yesterday, and many roads haven't been plowed yet. While I could and would certainly get to a doctor if it was an emergency, it is currently too difficult to do without pressing need.
I am a 46YO woman who contracted the flu very early this month, it turned into bronchitis which was treated with a z-pak, and then it turned into pneumonia, which I am currently halfway through a ten day prescription of levaquin for.
My doctor knows that we have crappy health insurance, so he diagnosed based on symptoms and examination. Being positive of the diagnosis, he said that I could get a chest x-ray just to make it official, but that it wouldn't change the initial course of treatment. He did tell me to contact him immediately if I started feeling worse, but as luck usually has it, I didn't start feeling worse until Saturday.
I have very rarely had a fever through any of this, and the highest it has ever been was 100.5 but it has also been as low as 95.5, which I read pneumonia can do. My worst symptoms are a horrible cough, pain breathing, shortness of breath when just walking around the house, and the most aggravating... A horrible back ache that has been consistent for exactly two weeks now. The back ache is in what diagrams refer to as my lower middle back, right behind where the bottom of the lungs are, but I also see that there are muscles there. The backache feels completely muscular, which is why I assumed it was from the cough and ignored it for a week before mentioning it to the doctor. I then mentioned it to him, because it is completely symmetrical, the pain is in the exact same place on both sides, and the pain level came on slowly and then stayed consistent. It isn't acting like a pulled muscle that comes on all of the sudden and then slowly gets better over a few days or a week. It is hard to explain, it just feels so much like matching muscle aches. So that is my first set of questions. Does a pneumonia backache feel like a muscle ache? Is it common for muscle aches to be exactly the same in location both left and right and to stay exactly the same in pain level for multiple weeks? I have been propping myself up on the same sofa the same exact way every day, so maybe I am doing something weird to my back? Only in the past 24 hours (of course, during the blizzard) the same pain started on both sides, and on both sides in the front. It is behind my last four or five ribs. I started worrying this afternoon because I was walking completely upright towards the refrigerator, not bending or twisting in any way whatsoever, and sharp blinding pain in the area under my front lower ribs brought me to my knees. The thing that makes this slightly questionable, is that I have a pretty serious medical condition with my digestive system, and we had just eaten. After this blinding pain that felt clearly in my ribs when things settled down, the whole lateral hurt, so I couldn't even tell what was lungs and what was stomach. Just seems like too much of a coincidence that a stomach pain would be in direct parallel to a backache, all right in line with my lower lungs when my doctor believes I have pneumonia. I clearly still have bronchitis, because when I cough I feel and hear my chest under my breast plate rumbling. There isn't much mucous, but it is white, which the internet says indicates the common form of bacterial pneumonia. Possibly also worth mentioning that the coughing spells are so bad sometimes that I almost blackout and then I have the tingling sensation that you get if you are hyperventilating.
Anyway, when I could move from the refrigerator, my husband got me to the sofa, and for a few weeks now, as long as I am sitting or lying still, I feel fine except for a cough and the back ache. Today when I got back the sofa, it felt like my eyes were vibrating, and everything in my field of vision was also vibrating, like it does when you look through a haze of fuel, but maybe a little bit sharper of a vibration then the fluidity of the fuel type vision. I looked it up, and it seems like that could have simply been low blood pressure, a migraine which I am prone to but have never had this symptom with, or perhaps even just a side effect of levaquin.
So... The lung pain has just gotten very bad today, and the shortness of breath has definitely gotten worse. As long as I feel fine lying on the couch, my feeling is just continue to lie on the couch. Am I being foolish not going straight to an ER? If that isn't necessary, does this sound like the normal course of pneumonia, or should I have it checked out tomorrow or Tuesday regardless? On one hand I feel like I am only halfway through the levaquin, so see what the full course does. On the other I feel that I AM halfway through the levaquin, and should be feeling better than this with five pills in my system, not worse.
The only other thing that I am taking is delsym for the cough.
Submitted January 25, 2016 at 06:58AM by ChrisW828 http://ift.tt/1KyHbsV AskDocs
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