Update on Us

 Friends, Romans, countrymen, lend me your ears. 

LOL

No, really. I just wanted to put some words down for wide dissemination, since I'm going through *a thing* and it's a lot to explain in Instagram DMs to everyone. 

So, I've had a cough for a while. I went to the doctor here on base, and she gave me allergy meds. This tracked and felt appropriate to me; the weather in Naples was changing drastically from day to day, some days sunny and warming up, some days rainy and cool. 

A little while later, still on allergy meds and cough syrup, we traveled back to the states, secure in the knowledge that I wasn't ferrying covid or something back to everyone. While there, it got harder to breathe. I chalked it up to a poor adjustment to Florida's humidity, being out of shape, suddenly eating American food after a year and a half. 

A couple of days after we returned, I had a coughing fit one evening that turned into vomiting every time I coughed, and I thought, this is new for me, let's hit the ER on base. I really figured they would send me home after a long wait with some extra cough syrup and maybe a tougher allergy med, but the doc there took a look through my record and was concerned about a false positive TB test from before we moved; however, I knew I had a clear chest x-ray and a second clear blood test after that, or else I wouldn't have been cleared for overseas travel by the military. 

After a new chest x-ray and a CT scan, the docs confirmed TB was not an issue, but that I did have a rather large mass in my lung, fluid around my heart, and no real answers on the cough other than that my airway was being strained.

That was April 5th. Navy med in Naples isn't really capable of handling the types of tests and screenings required to diagnose and treat me, so I was sent to the Italian hospital on the 17th. This visit, after much translation and back-and-forth, resulted in me being on antibiotics to rule out infection and possibly reduce inflammation of the mass, or the swelling around it. (Reminder: this is all my not-a-doctor understanding of my own situation). I was prescribed a pile of medicines, and because... Naples, it included delivering the antibiotics via shots, a nebulizer medication I had to find a machine for... it's a lot. Then, I'd have to wait for the antibiotics course to complete, get more scans and blood tests, and perhaps a bronchoscopy (a look around and biopsy of the mass procedure).  

my pile of meds from the Italian pharmacy

At this point, it'd been a few weeks with no real answers, and while the Italian hospital option was supposed to help, it felt further from a diagnosis. My doctors and I agreed that getting me back to the States, at least temporarily for now, to get diagnosed and initial treatment, would be the best course of action. Currently, I'm looking at returning for that shortly. If the diagnosis requires more long-term treatment, our family will be making a permanent change of duty station and returning to live in America again. While this isn't a bad option for us, it's obviously unexpected, doesn't leave us a lot of time to prepare or complete any of our European travel goals, and a lot is still up in the air. Having a diagnosis will give us a clear way forward, even if it is a rough and complicated way to getting us back home and getting me whatever treatment is available and required. There is so much more we wanted to do in Europe... at the same time, our base housing apartment is kind of the worst, between the moldy walls and windows, the constant bugs, the terrible air quality of this region, and the lack 

Anyway, that's our family update for now (well, my part of it). There are more questions than answers for now, but we're trucking through and trying to maintain as much stability for the kids as we can. 

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