\u00a0 Because I can’t get my pictures to upload I will continue on my lectures. Today it will be about Histoplasmosis.\u00a0 Tomorrow, it\u00a0might be about toenail fungus.\u00a0 Who knows?<\/p>\n
\u00a0 Histoplasmosis is an infectious disease caused by a fungus. Sounds fun so far, doesn’t it?\u00a0 I have had a run in with this disease.\u00a0 Chickens have gotten a bum rap for causing this when one can get it in many different ways.<\/p>\n
\u00a0 My history with histoplasmosis began after the birth of my third and youngest child in 1977.\u00a0 I was a pretty healthy woman and had not suffered any kinds of diseases or health problems ever except for tonsillitis\u00a0 in my youth.\u00a0 One day as I was watching television, I noticed the people all had two heads.\u00a0 Hmm, that was strange.\u00a0 Was I just tired or did I need glasses? This happened just before David and I was\u00a0to take a youth group to Arkansas to a Passion play there.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0 We were making plans to take this trip and I didn’t have time to think about\u00a0my problems\u00a0with a new baby and two small children at home.\u00a0 We took the trip and at the Passion play I was seeing everything in double.\u00a0 Well, I must need glasses pretty badly.\u00a0 It was a very stressful trip in more ways than one and we were so ready to get home.<\/p>\n
\u00a0 The next week, I made an appointment with an eye doctor and he said I might have cancer of the eye.\u00a0 Well, this made me very upset.\u00a0 I was sent to the IU medical center in Indianapolis to the eye center where one of the bests eye specialists practiced.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 I was put through all kinds of eye exams, one of which\u00a0 was having a dye put in my veins and pictures taken\u00a0inside my eye.\u00a0 It was soon discovered I was allergic to this dye as I passed out on them.\u00a0After all the tests, Dr. Schlegel told me I had\u00a0Ocular Histoplasmosis.\u00a0 I didn’t have a clue\u00a0what that was.\u00a0 Then he told me something very interesting.\u00a0 He said that most people who live in the Ohio valley and surrounding areas have Histoplasmosis in their bodies, usually in their lungs. Mine had gravitated from my lungs to my left eye and destroyed my central vision there.\u00a0 Histoplasmosis can be caused by pigeons or any kinds of bird dropping where people breathe the fungus from the air.\u00a0 Evidently the Ohio valley has a large amount of birds, thus the fungus.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0 I was sure I was going to go blind and not see my children’s faces as they grew up.\u00a0 I was beside myself.\u00a0 Then think what I thought when Dr. Schlegel told me I had two options.\u00a0 Take\u00a0 corizone\u00a0 which would very probably make me gain weight or get a cortisone shot in the eye, which wouldn’t.\u00a0 Guess which one I chose?\u00a0 I didn’t want to gain weight.\u00a0 So a shot in the eye I got.\u00a0 If someone had told\u00a0me that one day I would have to have a needle put in my eye I would have told them it’s never going to happen, but when you are faced with the decision, you must make it.\u00a0 Seeing that needle come toward my eye was a weird feeling, but it really did not\u00a0hurt at all and it stopped the bleeding in my eye.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0 David and I had to make several trips to Indianapolis where I would get a shot in my eye every few months.\u00a0 Then one day Dr. Schlegel told me my eye was as bad as it was going to get and there was nothing else to be done for it.\u00a0 I was really glad of that.\u00a0 Now I have heard from eye doctors that this disease of the eye can be surgically corrected if caught in time.\u00a0 Mine cannot be fixed.\u00a0 But I am use to it now and don’t even think about it unless I shut my right eye and then everything gets blurry.\u00a0 I am so thankful that I still have my vision in my right eye.<\/p>\n
\u00a0\u00a0 Years later, my husband had an x-ray taken of his lungs and a spot was found.\u00a0 Since he smoked, we both thought it was cancer.\u00a0 After many tests, the doctors said it was a calcification of Histoplasmosis in his lung.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0 Then our son called us one day when he was stationed out west in the military and said they had found a spot on his lung.\u00a0 Of course he thought it was cancer and was very worried.\u00a0 Then he went to a doctor who was from the Midwest and he asked my son where he was from and when he said Indiana, the doctor actually laughed and said what he had was Histoplamosis.\u00a0<\/p>\n
\u00a0 So that has been my family’s experience with this disease.\u00a0 It isn’t fun, but it isn’t life threatening unless you do nothing about it.\u00a0\u00a0\u00a0 I have found with just about any disease people learn to adjust their lives around it whether it causes you to go blind, lose your ability to walk, or any other of a myriad sort of things.\u00a0 People are tough.\u00a0 I found out how tough I was to face this rather frightening disease.\u00a0 Now I can even joke about it and I can’t watch 3-D movies, but that’s okay.\u00a0 I saw my children grow up and can see my grandchildren and that’s worth everything I went through.<\/p>\n
\u00a0 Here’s to sight, health and being tough when times get tough.\u00a0 Bye.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
\u00a0 Because I can’t get my pictures to upload I will continue on my lectures. Today it will be about Histoplasmosis.\u00a0 Tomorrow, it\u00a0might be about toenail fungus.\u00a0 Who knows? \u00a0 Histoplasmosis is an infectious disease caused by a fungus. Sounds fun so far, doesn’t it?\u00a0 I have had a run in with this disease.\u00a0 Chickens […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-756","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-health-and-fitness"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=756"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":760,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/756\/revisions\/760"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=756"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=756"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/snicklefritz.net\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=756"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}