"It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver."

"It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver."

~Mohandas K Gandhi

Sunday, December 26, 2010

I begin again...

This is my second blog; my first one, http://jerseygirlkarin.blogspot.com/, is where I discuss my son's issues with Sensory Processing Disorder.  In this blog, I'll be discussing my own health issues.  The name of the blog comes from a guote from Gandhi that I liked: "It is health that is real wealth and not pieces of gold and silver."  It struck a chord with me, because I have always felt that if possible, I would pay any sum of money to get my health problems fixed.  However, my problems are not currently curable by medical science, so here I am.

First and foremost, I have a Primary Immune Deficicncy (PID).  PIDs are different from Secondary immune Deficiencies in that PIDs are caused by something inside the body (mostly, by genetic defects), and SIDs are caused by something outside the body- ie., HIV/AIDS, which is caused by a virus.  PIDs are not communicable, but for obvious reasons, they can be inherited.  This was a huge concern to me when I was pregnant with my son.  Not that I wish I was never born or anything, but I was overwhelmed at the thought of caring for a child with the same needs I had, while getting sick often myself.  Fortunately, we had him tested when he was about a year old, and his immune system is normal.

I am deficient in IgG, which is the stuff that protects against a wide variety of infections.  My problems are and always have been mostly respiratory.  I was diagnosed with this at the age of 29, even though I had been sick a lot my entire life.  Because I was not diagnosed any earlier, many of my respiratory infections during childhood were not treated aggressively enough, which led to my lungs basically being damaged, a condition called bronchiectasis.  People with bronchiectasis get respiratory infections with far greater frequency, and we cough, a lot, even when we're not sick.  The reason for this is, the bronchial tubes in a patient with bronchiectasis have been damaged, with the cilia in them destroyed, and they manufacture too much mucus.  Eeveryone's lungs manufacture some mucus- it's what keep the lungs lubricated and healthy.  But too much is bad and breeds infection, and can make breathing difficult.  I was diagnosed with bronchiectasis a week after my sixth birthday.

I think that's enough to start out with...

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