Mystery Disease: Self-Diagnosis Leads to More Anxiety Than Relief

Each of my lungs had become a branding iron, searing the inside of my ribcage and threatening to burn straight through my chest.

I woke up at least every 15 minutes coughing so forcefully that I was having convulsions. My body was drenched in sweat, and my mind started racing toward all the possibilities. Tuberculosis? Hantavirus? Valley fever?

Try as I might, I still don’t have a definitive diagnosis nearly a month later. My attempt to find out what seemed – for a brief period anyway – to be killing me revealed a few basic gaps in our health care system that I am going to explore over a few posts.

Self-diagnosis is usually the first step for anyone who gets sick, and, for me, this only added to my stress and – it seems – exacerbated my symptoms. (Although I have no clinical proof of that.)

Let’s get back to the night I thought I was going to die. I was alone, on the other side of the country. Had I been home, I would have asked my wife to drive me to the emergency room. But it didn’t seem like an option that night in the hotel. What I needed was sleep.

I was scheduled to coordinate a series of events the following day. There was no way I could drop out now.

I kept telling myself that I was just suffering from a cold that had taken a mean turn. Two weeks prior, everyone in my house had a variation on a sniffle and a sneeze. Nobody else, though, had ended up with these violent coughing spasms.

My wife would tell you that I usually get a cold that lasts about two weeks every year, and I usually take Dayquil and never miss a day of work. But Dayquil wasn’t making a dent this time. I tried Nyquil during the day instead and doubled my coffee intake to compensate. I tried Sudafed and had to cut back on the coffee after seeing my hand start shaking on the keypad.

Then I tried Delsym, which may have had a placebo effect the first day but then only made me smell like Tang, especially at twice the recommended dose.

My body ached at various times so I took Advil. My head felt like it was expanding from the inside out, so I took Tylenol. The only thing that seemed to work at all for the cough was a basic Halls cough drop – I like honey and lemon flavored – but I had to keep one in my mouth continuously or the cough would come roaring back.

But this night, I needed sleep. (Did I say that already? That’s how badly I needed to sleep.) Sleeping with a cough drop in my mouth seemed logistically challenging if not outright reckless, so that led me back to a new round of self-diagnosis.

From about 1 a.m. until 2 a.m., I looked at a variety of information that came up with searches like, “persistent cough,” “aggressive cough,” and “dry hacking cough.”

“Persistent cough” pulled up an About.com post that included lung cancer as one possbility.

“Dry hacking cough” yielded a post telling me to apply Vicks to the bottom of my feet.

And “coughing fit” returned this story from the Independent in London: Driver ploughs into school children and lollipop lady during coughing fit.

This was Lesson One for me. The Internet is a terrible general practitioner. Despite knowing this in theory for years, I had not been so unfortunate up until that point to have suffered a personal emergency that left me at the mercy of Google. Now, each search result only made me more anxious and made my coughing more fierce. I finally closed my computer and buried my face in my pillow, hoping that just the sheer lack of oxygen would make my coughs go away. I estimate I slept for about 45 minutes before the alarm went off.

That morning, it was everything I could do to put my shoes on.

 “Bill sounds like he’s going to die,” one of my colleagues joked the morning of the events.

I smiled and didn’t say anything, afraid I would start coughing again. The whole day, I tried to say as little as possible and just keep a cough drop in my mouth. During a break, I called back to Seattle to schedule an appointment with the first doctor who had an opening.

“I couldn’t figure anything out from the Internet, but I think it’s probably bronchitis,” I told the scheduler. “If so, it’s a bronchitis that burns like hell.”

Everyone on the flight back – sorry Alaska Flight 3 – must have wished I had been quarantined to the luggage compartment.

“I’m past the contagious stage,” I said, with as much hope as embarrassment in my voice.

“I knew a guy once with tuberculosis, and he sounded like that,” a guy next to me said.

“I don’t think it’s tuberculosis,” I said. “No blood.”

Then I fell dead asleep.

Next: With best guesses as only guide, doctor throws a Hail Mary

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