Slashdot Mirror
Patrick Volkerding Battles Mystery Illness
sethadam1 writes "Calling all Slashdoctors! Pat Volkerding, maintainer of Slackware Linux, needs your help. This morning, he posted his very detailed account (mirror) of his battle with Actinomyces here on the Slackware FTP server. Patrick has given his blood, sweat, and tears to the open source community for years in Slackware, one of the oldest surviving Linux distributions. If you can, please help!"
At least he has a sense of humor.
This man does not need his story posted on Slashdot, he needs emergency intervention from the specialist RIGHT NOW even if that means he gets screwed on some BS clause in his insurance contract. He's been running around with this infection for so long it's getting critical and he needs to skip out on all the nonsense and get help IMMEDIATELY. When you're talking about spreading infections the last thing you want to do is roll the dice by delaying treatment. Yea, it might slow enough for him to be okay, but it's an infection, so maybe not.
Christ, if he's going to get screwed by some stupid HMO if he doesn't play their little game or something, I'll toss a couple bucks into a donation fund for the medical bills if someone sets one up.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
- Provide medical advice?
- Drive him to the hospital?
- Send money to pay for his treatment?
- Develop a miracle drug to cure him?
- Contribute time or money to Slackware Linux?
With TFA slashdotted, I don't know exactly what he wants. How do I know if I can help?The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
repeatedly defaced for the next few hours.
This is open source on the extreme level... who wants to sign up for open heart surgery open source?
I like muppets.
That's the least all of us can do that believe in such things. He's done great work. Without his Slackware books and releases, I'd probably not be involved with Linux.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
Being 6'2" and about 145 pounds I knew I didn't want to be losing any weight.
;)
Is that even remotely healthy? After my grandfather passed away earlier this year he weighed in at 102 pounds at his nursing home. He hadn't walked or moved in over 5 years. He looked absolutely sickly as it was. I can't imagine if he was 6'2" and active.
I inquired with several physicians about "lung plaque" and most of them had never heard of such a thing.
He claims in the story that he's not a hypochondriac but this sure does sound like a partial one.
While driving back I felt a sharp pain in my left side and felt something in there pop and drain (maybe into the pleura?), and since cancer was well on my mind, as well as the fact that this had been going on for way too long, I headed straight to the nearest ER hoping I wasn't bleeding internally or something like that.
While I'm lucky I have never had something like this happen to me I just can't imagine that you would be able to feel yourself "pop" and bleed internally.
He keeps getting prescriptions for ciprofloxacin (and at one point apparently got one w/o really meeting with a doctor) and taking them and saying he's feeling better. Perhaps he's just aggravating the issues?
They have a whole new classification of people that think they are sick with something and search the Internet until they find out what fits them best. I really believe that this may be part of his problem. Then again I'm just reading what some guy says on the Internet and I'm not a doctor
Actions like this (trying to help another) are what really make a community. The fact that people pull together to help another person, whom they probably don't know, proves incorrect those who criticize this community as many takers feeding off of a few givers.
At times, I can see their point. Many people download software/use manuals written by other people, while relatively few contribute actual code (guilty myself). But actions like this allay my concerns and show there really is a true community here.
Slashdot Syndrome: the sudden, extreme urge to correct someone in order to validate one's self.
Patrick, thanks for keep us in the loop. Im praying for you. Good luck guy and God bless.
http://www.freebsd.org
"Extended Exposure To Linux Proven to be Dangerous to Your Health!"
Not only is Linux less secure than Windows for computer bourne infectants, but recent studies have shown that users who have extended exposure to the operating system come down with other human based diseases at a rate greater than 100% greater than Windows users.
In related news, SCO guarantees safety from infection by end users who pay their modest licensing fee.
WebMD didn't have anything that I could find, but a google found this eMedicine
I am not anything near a Md so this makes no sence to me. But as they say the half of knowledge is knowing where to find knowledge.
500 dollar reward for tip(s) leading to the arrest of the person(s) who stole my sig.
But self-medicating like he did with the Cipro is part of the problem with medical care in this country.
/waiting for the superbug
If you have a multi-year problem, go do the doctor! Do what they tell you! DON'T think you know more than them. Doing research on your own is one thing (good-on-ya there) but antibiotics are not toys!
Hope you get better, though.
-- IANAEG - I am not an elder god.
"Format hard drive
apt-get update
apt-get dist-upgrade
and call me in the morning"
That might work for one of the Debian developers, but not here. Pat's doctor has to configure him cell by cell.
As per the dude's post, googling for sulfur lung granules works fine.
The first hit is fine.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Grrrrrrrrrrrrrrrrr http://www.henryfordhealth.org/14777.cfm
Although he doesn't come out and say it, it appears that he was treating himself with antibiotics.
This is astonishing, and I'd go as far to say this is stupid, and even immoral.
Stupid, because you could create a drug resistant strain of whatever it is and kill yourself. Who know, he probably already has. Immoral, because that drug resistant strain of whatever is now a threat to everyone else if they catch it.
Folks, don't be treating yourself with antibiotics. Unless you're a doctor, you don't know what you're doing.
Fascism trolls keeping me up every night. When I starts a preachin', he HITS ME WITH HIS REICH!
>With TFA slashdotted, I don't know exactly what he wants. How do I know if I can help?
TFA has already been cut-and-pasted into the Slashdot thread. To summarize:
If you are an infectious disease specialist who can prescribe high doses of antibiotics (presumably penicillin-based, delivered by IV), and/or admit him to a hospital, you're supposed to call him or email him, and that goes double if you have experience treating Actinomycosis.
Go to The Slackware Store and get a cute little penguin, or preorder Slackware 10.1. This is not a bad time to show Patrick some appreciation for what is IMHO still the best distribution out there.
Man, reading the whole thing almost made me sick...
Poor guy, I really hope he gets cured soon, and I also home his health insurance is covering it all...
Please take him to a doctor/hospital immediately. Forcibly, if necessary.
Please call only if you can help get me some high- dose antibiotic treatment. I have been trying to check email at least once a day at volkerdi@slackware.com as well. I'll accept whatever you'd like to send me at that address (as usual :-), but if you're
contacting me with an offer of help please add [HELP] to the subject
so that I'll be able to find those emails more easily. Say prayers,
knock on wood, whatever. I need all the help I can get. I also hope
if I'm off the job for a couple more weeks that the Slackware
community will still support me until I can return to the job, which
I'm really itching to do ASAP.
BTW, the mirror is now down, here is another:
http://www.unixsphere.net/~devnull/PAT-NEEDS-YOUR- HELP.txt
Helpful tip: If you're feeling like you might die, you just might. Seek immediate medical attention, not advice from /.'ers.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
- RE those "It's inconsiderate to post this on slashdot":
- NEEDS-YOUR-HELP.txt u rrent/PAT-NEEDS-YOUR-HELP.txt
"Now, I'm hoping that this will get seen by a lot of people and that if it hits Slashdot that some kind medical geek will help save my life."
- Mirrors:
http://uml.axpr.net/
http://slackware.osuosl.org/slackware-current/PAT
ftp://ftp.slackware.com/pub/slackware/slackware-c
- Clarifications:
--he does not want a help fund - we've asked him.
--the gpg signature is valid, key is on the slackware 10 disc, and he keeps the private keys on a computer which is not attached to the internet.
On an IV antibiotic drip. My wife had complications after an appendectomy. The resulting infection took 2 weeks in the hospital with an antibiotic IV, plus 2 drain tubes into her belly. The doctors were quite clear that the only way to fix an internal infection is with drains and IV antibiotics. I hope he'll get in and get fixed.
Disclaimer: I am not a doctor and this is not medical advise.
"Eve of Destruction", it's not just for old hippies anymore...
See that star next to my name idiot-boy? I already RTFA. He needs to go to the specialist right now not wait until Friday.
Infections can and do spread through the body at an exponential rate once they break loose. This man CANNOT afford to wait until Friday, he needs to go the ID specialist IMMEDIATELY or he could well be dead or permanently injured before he has a chance Friday.
Alito: A vote for Alito is a punch in the eye to put that bitch back in her place!
Why in the hell would anyone self-medicate themselves with cipro? Antibiotic abuse is bad enough among physicians, let alone some guy self-medicating himself.
But he learned a hard lesson. 1. don't self-medicate and 2. research yourself when in doubt. take your findings to your primary care physician whom you have a relationship with.
may God be with you.
100% Insightful
"Please call only if you can help get me some high-dose antibiotic treatment."
I'm sure this guy is a good guy in all.... but who here is really ready to commit a felony just to help him save a few bucks?
Don't ask us for medical help. Get you ass to a doctor and then ask for money.
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
Interesting how I tried to type "911" and it automatically came out "9-11", eh? Too much election makes Skyshadow something something.
Every year during my review, I just pray the words "slashdot.org" aren't mentioned.
Apart from cold winters, Minnesota is known for the kick ass medical centers. Fargo isn't that far of a drive. I would suggest driving to minneapolis (U of M) or rochester (Mayo). There is probably someone that has spent half of their life studying this stuff around here. I know it's a shameless plug for MN, but we need something to brag about.
"we're trapped in the belly of this horrible machine and the machine is bleeding to death" - gy!be
WebMD was no help, that's rather surprising!
/., not a doctor! Get your ass to the ER NOW! Anything that has a treatment of IV Antibiotics is inherently a bad-ass motherfucker, don't wait for it to kill you before you decide to get treatment.
Found this and this if you want some more info. Deep medical geekness on the first one, the NIH.GOV link is a little better for us laypeople. Sounds like Mr. Volkerding has a much more serious version than these talk about.
Dammit man, this is
Being in Fargo, he's only 5 1/2 hours from Rochester, MN, where the Mayo Clinic is. I'm not sure if its warranted, but I've known a few people who have gone there under similar circumstances when all else has failed.
But yes, you really shouldn't self-prescribe antibiotics. Even if you think you know what it is you have, go see a doctor anyway.
And while I'm at it: take the whole course. Don't stop just because your symptoms go away.
After reading all that, I have the sudden need to go and brush my teeth. Again.
Yaz.
http://www.dangerz.net/dz/PAT-NEEDS-YOUR-HELP.txt
The greatest experience we can have is the mysterious.
- Albert Einstein
Diagnosis is rarely suspected or made on clinical grounds. Usually, the clinical laboratory or the pathologist provides diagnosis.
Patients present with nonspecific symptoms and findings, such as fever, weight loss, diarrhea or constipation, and abdominal pain. Extension to the perirectal space is not uncommon and these patients present with defecation complaints.
-----------------------
So basically we have a disease that doctors can't even disgnose reliably most of the time, with very nonspecific symptoms ranging over a huge range.
I hope he gets a good doctor that totally ignores his self-diagnosis. The ones he has dealt with in the past seemed way too likely to just give him what he wanted without making a real diagnosis.
I've had enough abrasive sigs. Kittens are cute and fuzzy.
I've been getting some mail over this, and most of it is positive stuff that has me feeling better right now. Thanks. :-)
One thing I'd like to clear up is that I am not now, nor have I ever been self-medicating with Cipro or any other antibiotics. I've always taken them under the advice of and with a prescription from a qualified medical doctor.
Again, I'm feeling better and hope it continues. Thanks for the well wishes!
Pat
Googling your medical symptoms, and going for trips to Fargo while seriously ill is _not_ the way to get better.
/.'ers could do right now is buy more slackware T-Shirts I guess.
If the US health system wasn't on a "pay us money or drop dead" basis, he probobly would have gotten serious treatement by now. Probobly another reason to go to Canada.
Advice:
Get to a hospital NOW
Get serious treatement for disease
Bed Rest until COMPLETELY cured.
No not under any circumstances do anything at all related to computers, no matter how much you want to. Administrating Slackware systems is probobly half the cause of the disease.
About the best thing
May the Maths Be with you!
Actually he said he already found one.
"Rodney has no ability to directly admit me to a hospital without first sending me to an infectious disease MD there who would have to agree with all of this. I have an appointment on Friday."
What I got from the article is he just wants us to send him some drugs....
"Please call only if you can help get me some high-dose antibiotic treatment."
Technology, the cause of and solution to all of life's problems.
It is an interesting story and an illustration of how difficult it can be to get some illnesses diagnosed and properly treated. It sounds like the infection has spread pretty far. It also sounds like he has been seeing doctors and doing what he was told are the right things (although way too many doctors didn't get the right diagnosis and self medicating on Cipro may not have been a good idea). As long as he is in Fargo, he may want to consider going to Rochester, MN. I understand that the Mayo clinic has some great infectious disease specialists. I wish him the best of luck and a complete recovery.
If you click on the link to the pathogen (something that causes disease) Mycobacterium, you can learn about what diseases may form as a result of contact or ingestion, including Tuberculosis.
Actinomycosis
It is by the juice of the coffee bean that thoughts acquire speed, the teeth acquire stains. The stains become a warning
http://www.emedicine.com/MED/topic31.htm
Prognosis:
* When actinomycosis is diagnosed early and treated with appropriate antibiotic therapy, the prognosis is excellent.
* The more advanced and complicated actinomycotic forms require aggressive antibiotic and surgical therapy for optimal outcome; however, deaths can occur despite such therapy.
I interviewed him about a million years ago at Comdex. Out of all of the hyped-up Linux people there, Patrick was probably the most human. Everyone had that glassy-eyed 'I'm going to make a million dollars' look in their eye, except for Patrick. Patrick was smiling the whole time and just enjoying himself. I hope you'll do what you can to help the guy out, I'm gonna see what I can come up with.
for doctoring stuff; Fargo is schytte haute medically, what with staff docs flying to Mayo for rounds and operating a daVinci surgical robosuite. He should bring a sleeping bag and camp out at MeritCare ER with a copy of his "last post?" printout until they run him upstairs and aspirate a sample for culturing (also known as sucking up a little gob from inside the lung.) once the bug(s) are known for sure, they can put him on a drip.
he needs a workup, a monitor station, and a bed, not a black-market source of drugs and offsite diagnosis.
I wish Patrick all the best, and he needs to take a couple weeks to a month off and get a treatment regimen underway under competent medical supervision. if anybody's in contact, that means RFN, pard, take the taxi now. 701-235-5535.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Tonsilloliths are some times called "tonsil stones". I'm aware that he maintains the granule came from the lung, but I'd be interested to examine the throaght and tonsils throughally to eliminate that posibility. I'm also aware that tonsilloliths or similar objects can form much further down than the tonsils.
I'd be interested in whether the paitent had a history of tonsilitus, ear infection, post nasel drip or other sinus trouble.
I'd try to find an ENT (Ear nose and throaght) surgen to discuss that with (and if s/he hasn't heard of tonsil stones go somewhere else or take some info from the web). Next stop would be a lung specilist, and someone to investigate the stomach and esophagus.
Does anyone have an E-mail address where we can contact him if we can't call him by telephone?
I might suggest a trip here to Atlanta. Emory University Hospital is located right next to the CDC here.
On the other hand, finding an old country doctor might do the trick. I once had a gland or something under my armpit swell. Local hospital in Alabama at the time had no clue what it was. We were dirt poor in those days and a friend of ours drove us out to this old doctor's house. He looked at it, hobble back behind his counter and drug out a an old medicine bottle (remember when persciptions came in those old brown bottles?) and scowled, "Here. Give 'im this 3 times a day and put a heat pad on it!" My Mom said, "Okay, when do you want to see him again?" "See who?" he said. "My son, to see how it's doing?" she replied. "See how what's doing? There won't be anything to see!" he said. He was right. You can insert all the jokes about how hard it really is to stump an ER doctor in Alabama, but the old dude was right on!
from his post why he isn't already on the antibiotics, it doesn't sound like it is for lack of money or lack of health care. It sounds more like the doctors won't give them to him.
At this point he just needs to get somewhere where they can put him in a hospital bed and monitor the infection 24/7 or he's going to die. Hopefully his doctors will be able to treat him correctly and in time, because it would be a tragedy for the linux community if Slackware died.
--Brandon
If the engine in your car is making a funny sound and the mechanic says, I don't know what's broke but this here Marvel Mystery Oil should fix it, you need to find another mechanic. Same goes for a doctor.
You haven't fixed something until you know how it is supposed to work, figured out why it's not working, identified the cause, and dealt with the cause.
The doctor should figure out why you are broken and then apply a fix. To make sure he is doing his job you need to pin him down, just like you would someone who has written some code that doesn't work.
Now I'm the grandest Tiger in the Jungle!
he probably needs to be in a hospital for IV antibiotics (penicillin G).
They need to get a sputum culture for speciation and sensitivities. If it is indeed a lung abscess, it is most likely polymicrobial, and not just actinomyces!
Here's the scoop from the Textbook of Respiratory Medicine by Murray and Nadel:
Actinomycosis Epidemiology.
Although members of the Actinomycetaceae family are true bacteria, they were long considered fungi because of their filamentous morphology and slow growth characteristics. The indolent pulmonary infection produced by these organisms mimics that produced by fungi or mycobacteria. Different species within the two genera that cause actinomycosis (Actinomyces and Propionibacterium) produce subacute to chronic pulmonary infections that are virtually indistinguishable. Normally, these microorganisms reside as harmless commensals in the oropharynx. A defect in the host's anatomic barriers permits invasion into tissue, after which either a suppurative or a granulomatous inflammatory reaction or sometimes both develop.
Pulmonary actinomycotic infection follows aspiration of oropharyngeal material. Periodontitis and other dental diseases clearly increase the risk of cervicofacial invasion and, presumably, for acquiring pulmonary disease.[325] Infection may occur at any age, but most affected patients are between 30 and 60 years old. Cases in men outnumber those in women by four to one. such as bronchiectasis and obstructive lung disease are often associated underlying conditions.[326]
Clinical Manifestations.
The clinical manifestations of actinomycosis develop insidiously. Constitutional symptoms, including fatigue, weight loss, and low-grade fever, may be present for weeks to months before diagnosis. Chronic fungal infection, tuberculosis, and malignant tumor are prominent diagnostic considerations. Most patients develop productive cough and pleuritic chest pain gradually, but hemoptysis and putrid sputum are unusual.
On examination, patients with actinomycosis appear chronically ill. Fever may be absent altogether. Cervicofacial involvement is rarely observed in patients with thoracic involvement. In confined pulmonary disease, only local rales and diminished breath sounds are evident. There may be significant loss of lung volume owing to pulmonary destruction and fibrosis. Malignancy may be closely simulated, even at thoracotomy. In more advanced cases, actinomycosis progresses to involve the pleural space and thoracic wall. The opening of a sinus tract may appear on the chest and discharge characteristic "sulfur granule"-containing pus (Fig. 33.19) . These distinctive 2-mm gritty, yellow granules consist of masses of intertwined filaments of the Actinomyces or Propionibacterium organism that have been mineralized by host-derived calcium phosphate. Granules can be collected for histopathologic evaluation and culture by filtering of the pus through gauze.
Notably, laboratory abnormalities, including leukocytosis, are absent in most patients with actinomycosis. In chronic cases, anemia may be profound. Radiographic findings are variable. Most commonly, the process is confined to a single lobe and produces one or more small cavitary lesions. In advanced cases, the findings are more distinctive, with penetration through the chest wall, destruction of adjacent bone tissue, or direct extension through an interlobar fissure.[327] Other possible radiographic findings include a solitary lung nodule, fibrocavitary infiltrate, or massive empyema.[328]
Microbiologic Diagnosis.
Members of the Actinomyces and Propionibacterium genera are gram-positive, diphtheroidal or filamentous, branching bacilli. Most strains grow best in anaerobic conditions, although some also grow aerobically. Strains are identified in the clinical laboratory on the basis of biochemical properties and by gas-liquid chromatography of fatty acid end products.
In patients with a cutaneous chest wall sinus, the best me
His post is SO rife with commonalities in medicine, as an employee at a very busy ER, I just can't pass this up:
1. Don't ever fricking take antibiotics unless a physician prescribes them for you.
Come on children, even Dr. Evil went to evil medical school for a reason. Specific antibiotics work on specific bugs. Usually they will get cultures to figure out what bug is causing the problem. In the meantime, they will usually start you out on something they've picked based on their exam and your history...and you know what? That's a hard choice, even for Docs. In the meantime, when you take something you picked off of rxlist.com, you are either feeding your bug or are cross-training it, making it stronger.
Specifically in Pat's case: Cipro, which he took, is a fluoroquinolone. Fluoroquinolones in general are bad choices for treating Actinomycosis.
2. Don't skip sround from doc to doc to doc.
This is just stupid. Wherever you go first, give them two or three chances to fix ya. If it's something emergent, go to the same ED 2 or 3 times, then head to the nearest research-university's ED. Particularly now that HIPAA is law, it's very difficult for different hospital systems to share information. In addition, they ALL have different protocols, which means each specific institution will tackle the same problem differently, and each time you go to a new one, they have to essentially start at the beginning. Pick a good, well-respected facility, and stick with them.
While we're on the subject: ER medicine, because of the astronomical overcrowding nowadays, has adopted a if-they're-gonna-live-then-getem-outta-here policy. If you're even remotely describable as stable, your ass is getting discharged.
3. Let us not underestimate the power of google.
Actinomycosis (NOT actinomyces) is pretty freaking rare. I think it's safe to say that google contains more information than any human/physician can hold in his head. A tip tho: before you take a page you've googled to your doc, search for another, different website (I usually look for 3-5) with the same information. Every site you find with the same info adds legitimacy to the next.
As a qualified /. MD I can tell you that this is an oddnstory. Now, where the actinomyces bit comes from is a mystery because his letter doesn't mention it. The complaints he lists are not typical of anything but the consistently normal results of CT/Thorax and lab (the deviations he lists are not significant) suggest that some of it may be more mental than anything else. That said, some complaints can be consistent with a diagnosis of pleuritis/pericarditis or even pulmonary embolism. However, the additional investigations should have uncovered this. An infection is not very likely all considered. Why was nothing cultured? If Volkerding is expectorating, stuff can be cultured. Apparently no such material was available. In extremis, direct puncture of suspicious lesions can provide material for culture or PCR.
Actinomyces species, to name one cause of infection that seems to be relevant to this discussion, causes lung abcesses that lead to spitting of blood and fever and such. It is also associated with immunosuppression, ie in HIV infection or when on organ transplant medication to name a few. In all, no convincing case for an infection.
Lastly, I find this plea for help via the Internet rather odd. One might imagine that a well-educated person like mr. Volkerding should be able to find his way to proper medical care. The consistent failure of several doctors using pretty advanced technology to find any clear abnormality combined with the absence of typical symptoms suggests to me that mr Volkerding may not suffer from any physical abnormality at present.
----- One learns to itch where one can scratch.
The best place in the world to go if you have a weird problem is a universityhospital for a medical school. There you will find all sorts of specialists, who colect al the "zebra" cases from the surrounding 200 miles and treat them, 'cause no one else knows how to. Almost every medical school I know will take any pt, reguadless of insurance, on an emergency basis, and run the appropriate tests.
I am a surgeon, and I don't like the sound of his lung/chest complaints at all. The address for the school is..UND School of Medicine & Health Sciences, 501 N. Columbia Rd, Grand Forks, ND 58203
Phone:(701)777-5046
I wouldn't waste time with community doctors, they probably are in WAY over there heads, or might not even recognize the seriousness of the situaton.
..........FULL STOP.
He got all that from not brushing his teeth enough?
I know there's lots of jokes out there (and here!) about geeks and hygiene and all that, but this should serve as a reminder to all of us.
Keeping healthy is just like running a secure server: proper maintenance is vital.
"Ask not what your country can do for you." --John F. Kennedy
I have coughed up these granules from time to time. I asked my dentist and he told me it is plaque and bacteria that accumulate on the tonsils. The tonsils have "pits" on their surface that collect this material. Eventually so much material collects in these pits, that it can be knocked loose by a cough or a sneeze.
It's a generally harmless phenomenon, but it can lead to chronic bad breath due to the sulfur odor of the material. If this is a concern, you can buy a WaterPik and use it to irrigate your tonsils, thus removing any plaque or bacteria that has collected there. Some people have been able to use a small-headed toothbrush to brush the tonsils, but most people can't do it without gagging.
Apparently this guy aspirated some of the bacteria in his mouth or throat and an infection took hold internally. This isn't normal; a combination of excessive amounts of bacteria in the mouth due to poor oral hygiene, and perhaps a depressed immune system may have conspired against him to make him sick.
"The advanced societies of the future will be driven by competing systems of psychopathology." -JG Ballard
He actually says in his letter that he hopes it will make it to Slashdot. Big community, a lot of connections.
I Am Not A Doctor. I also have something similar to what you describe in terms of the "nodules". I discovered that they are apparently coming from the tonsils at the back of my throat. I talked to a doctor about them ages ago and was reassured they were nothing. I now worry and I notice the following: http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_m0BUM/is _3_82/ai_99618585
An acquaintance also mentioned that they had "tonsillar accretions" or whatever the correct term would be and that they just disappeared.
Good luck with sorting out the whole thing. The human body is a miracle of appalling engineering and we have by no means plumbed all of it's defects yet.
nodules? well, OK, you say so. a more general presentation of asthma is little chunks of normal white mucus (or two handsful of juicy, gooey, clear stuff in the front of a classroom, don't ask me how I know that.) the ER tagged it for me with a shot of epinephrine in the forearm muscle, cleared it in three minutes.
;)
regardless, if he's symptomatic like that, he needs to hit the ER, not the bulletin boards. hitting the boards cures procrastination, not disease
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
Head for your nearest big research hospital.
Lots of people die because the local doctors have never seen the 1 in 10000 disease they present with.
Get yourself to a big research hospital's ER immediately and your chances of survival will be much better.
Big research hospitals are the ones where people with 1 in 10000 illnesses are sent, and so the doctors there know what to look for. Also, you're more likely to be seen by a med student or resident who has most liklely read about your illness much more recently and is more likely not to rule it out due to its seeming implausibility.
A word of advice: Don't overly pre-diagnose yourself. Just go in and tell your symptoms. If you go to an automotive machanic and tell him your radiator is broken he'll replace it and charge you for it, even if it was just a hose. This isn't about cost, though, it's about your health. Don't pretend that you are more of an expert than you are!
Amazing magic tricks
One of my friends went on a choral tour of Romania one summer. While he was there, he lost all of his energy, and it got worse and worse. When he got back, they started checking for mono and other illnesses, and they all came back negative.
In the end, they found a virus that he had picked up there, that was *extremely* rare - I wish I could remember the name of it. According to his doctors, the only really effective treatment was 12 to 18 months of bedrest. They said that after about 6 months, he'd start feeling much better - but if he didn't stay on bedrest for the entire duration, the virus would likely come right back as soon as he started expending any energy.
So, the poor guy had to lay in a bed for a year and a half. He was bored out of his mind, and just about went crazy.
steve
Oh, you're not stuck, you're just unable to let go of the onion rings.
From ScienceBlog (and others, if you google for it):
People who use their computers to find information about their chronic disease often wind up in worse condition than if they had listened to their doctor, according to a University College London review of studies on Internet health. Using interactive computer tools does improve the medical knowledge of people with diabetes, asthma or other chronic conditions, and does provide them with positive feelings of social support, according to researchers reviewing 28 randomized controlled trials involving 4,042 participants. But there was no evidence that cyber-medicine helps people change their behavior and startling evidence that it may leave them in worse health.
Hes looking for a DOCTOR you twit. RTFA. Hes not looking for drugs, hes looking for doctors who know how to treat his illness, according to what hes read and been told.
Hes also the sole maintainer of (i believe) the second and oldest still maintained linux distributions.
.
and here is a clickable link to the URI I gave earlier. Part of the problem with this is that the tonsil thing may actually be quite widespread and not be a symptom of anything other than the lymphatic system doing its job: trapping and killing foreign bacteria. This produces the unpleasant accretions, especially with "cryptic" tonsils (ramified holes). So that _may_ be an epiphenomenon of whatever problem you have. Like I say, I'm NOT a doctor.
I just emailed this to PV, but thought I'd share it here as well. One very overlooked chronic infection problem in CA and other southwestern states is valley fever. This Arizona Univ site explains it a bit: http://www.vfce.arizona.edu/. It's often misdiagnosed as a bacterial infection, but it's actually a fungal infection, so antibiotics may knock down secondary infections but do nothing about the primary cause. There's probably a ton of people out there in the affected areas or who have visited the affected areas who have chronic coughs, fatigue or other symptoms that go undiagnosed or worse, labeled as hypochondriacs, because this disease is so poorly screened for by clinicians. Even if a patient brings it up, they'll often only do a chest xray instead of cultures and microscopic inspection of fluid. People who move into the area as adults and who spend time outside in dust storms or working in the soil are at prime risk. Children born in the affected areas tend to pick up immunity from mild infections in childhood, but may still suffer problems (I often wonder if the rise in asthma in the areas is really due to the ag pollution and/or smog as commonly suggested or if there's a valley fever component too). Those who work in construction, agriculture or oil might think twice before relocating to the affected areas as this risk is often poorly explained to workers. As someone who has grown up in a strongly affected area, I constantly find myself explaining to people why staying sealed inside during windy/dusty days is well advised. I remember a decade or so ago the disease got a lot of local attention because a popular weatherman from the area became seriously ill (ie in the hospital for weeks on antifungal drips and still nearly dying) from valley fever, likely picked up when he was outside covering a dust storm. Nasty little disease when it hits seriously. Life affecting even when just a moderate chronic infection.
Patrick you have an insidious infectious disease that defies clear diagnosis and is drug resistant. Clearly you or your proxy should be contacting the CDC and/or a major facility that has expertise with infectious diseases. The main problem you have is that no one has really done an adequate clinical diagnosis.
If Patrick wants someone to prescribe high-dose antibiotics designed to kill germs that might be commonly found in the mouth, perhaps he can get his dad to write the prescription. I have a heart murmur, and before every trip to the dentist's chair, my dentist writes me a prescription for and makes me take a mega-dose of amoxicillin (I'm not sure how much in terms of mg, but it's 4 pills). Heck, I forgot to do it once, and he pulled some pills out of a drawer and gave them to me. His dad can prescribe this stuff...
Blogging Weight Loss, Distance Education, and more at verlin.com
Have any studies been done that show a correlation between use of automatic toothbrushes and this kind of infection?
Perhaps wrist exercises are helpful for more than one activity.
Partick, get well soon.
Slackware was the very first distro of Linux that I ran, way back in the 1990s. It was me and some relatives frustrated with Windows and trying out that new Linux thing.
I have since moved to Red Hat, then Mandrake, but Slackware has that special feel to it.
Got to thank you for that, and wish you well!
2bits.com, Inc: Drupal, WordPress, and LAMP performance tuning.
This man is sick, and you're here misspelling "disease"???
You fool!
"So he was getting the same ineffective treatment time after time because none of the doctors treating him knew the whole history."
Damn straight! When dealing with a chronic illness it's vital to have a running history with a doctor (or at the very least doctors at the same office).
Otherwise you'll never likely get past the first "menu option" in the support call, so to speak. Everyone's going to have you reboot your system and check your firewall settings when what you've really got is a buggy vid card driver.
From wikipedia:
Gomer: Stands for "Get Out Of My Emergency Room". This applies to anyone who comes in for a bogus reason. For example, a person comes in drunk rating less than 50 on the blaylock scale. Gomer was first introduced in the book by Samuel Shem "The House of God" - a nickname for a teaching hospital.
"And a voice was screaming: 'Holy Jesus! What are these goddamn animals?'" - HST
You can't restore a dead person from a backup tape. Some things need professional treatment, even if the professionals will screw you for all you're worth. If you don't like it, my suggestion would be to get cured NOW and then add every scrap of medical-related software you can find to Slackware to encourage people to consider that for a profession.
But whatever you end up deciding to do, you'll find it a lot easier if you're still alive to do it. And that means getting to a hospital with the appropriate facilities. Preferably by yesterday.
If you know a nearby hospital with a Contageous Disease unit, that would be perfect.
If you absolutely absolutely cannot afford treatment in a standard hospital, and insifficient people offer to help out there, then you may want to contact your nearest medical university. You may be able to cut some sort of deal, where you get cheaper care and they get to train students on rare, contageous diseases. It's not what I'd call a "first choice" option, but it works a whole lot better than being dead.
It's a small world and it smells funny; I'd buy another if it wasn't for the money; Take back what I paid (SoM)
Maybe Google will pay his medical bills. I mean that would be a hell of a commercial...
You need to seek qualified medical treatment.
Your best options are at the University of Minnesota, which is about a 4 hour drive, or the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, about a 5 hour drive. Either one will have doctors who are trained in the treatment of infectious diseases. I would first visit the hospital in Fargo and make sure you fill out a HIPAA release so that they can forward your records onto the appropriate hospitals.
It's clear you have an advanced infection that is not responding well to various treatments. The risks of developing an antibiotic resistant infection is very high with prolonged use of drugs like ciprofloxin.
If you need help, my cousin is a doctor at the U of M (in oncology/hemotology) who would be able to at least get you in touch with the right people there.
RTFA! He clearly states... just kidding.
I sincerely hope you get better, and I wish you have a speedy recovery.
All the best.
-Derek
Treat me like a marketing stat, and I'll treat your movie like a series of ones and zeros
My heart goes out to him and his family and I hope he gets the treatment he needs. However I've seen this type of "ignore it" reaction to health issues before sometimes leading to devistating results. The moral of this story is don't wait 3 years to get treated for something wrong with your body.
You know when things are out of sorts. Get help immediately.
Speak truth to power.
Faith can be handy, but nothing speaks like preventative action. Good dental hygiene. Seriously. Dead serious. More and more evidence is pointing to poor dental health as a vector for disease including heart disease and stroke.
This writeup on Pulmonary Actinomycosis (the possible disease in question here) reiterates that:
Poor dental hygiene and dental abscess can predispose people to facial lesions and lung infections caused by these bacteria.
So get to those twice-yearly dental cleanings and brush/floss. Plus with the thousands of dollars you save on not getting root canals and crowns, you can buy an awful lot of tech hardware....
Strange, what comes to mind for me is the tens of millions of uninsured people in the US who have NO health coverage, many of whom die because of it.
STFU about slashdot bias.
Patrick Volkerding Battles Mystery Illness
How exactly is it a mystery? It sounds like they have a diagnosis (Actinomyces) mentioned even in the article text. Is the headline supposed to be sensationalist?
Speak truth to power.
Yeah, some folks are slow readers like that.
JK!
Get well Pat! You have my best wishes.
Now I'm off to load a new server with Slack10!
Your thin skin doesn't make me a troll
Since Actinobacteria are gram positive bacteria, Usnea lichen extract might be effective. It certainly would be worth a try as it's only about $10 for a bottle of tincture. (I just did a search and found some from HerbPharm for $7.99/bottle; it's commonly available)
Usnea is a lichen known as 'Old Man's beard' that is commonly found on tree branches in wet areas (we have it in abundance here in the coastal Northwest). The active component, usnic acid has been shown to be effective against gram positive bacteria. There has been some renewed interest in Usnea since many of the more modern antibiotics have become ineffective against many strains of bacteria.
And, of course, nowhere in the story or in his post is any contact information to be found. :-/
Hopefully, this one works well: volkerdi_at_slackware.com.
The best would of course be a phone number. He needs help now. But being the geek he is, he'll read the mail ASAP.
Beware: In C++, your friends can see your privates!
Maybe he should have stopped felching earthworms?
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Actinobacteria
If you've come to Fargo, might I suggest travelling just a little bit farther to Rochester, MN.
As a Rochester resident, I hear lots of stories of the "Mayo Miracle". Patients that have exhuasted all other medical avenues with their home town docs and clinics come here. Sometimes they call the operator (507-284-2511) or sometimes they just show up at the ER. The infectous diseases area is 507-538-0030.
There are over 1500 docs and I'm sure one of them will be able to help.
A good friend will help you move. A really good friend will help you move a body.
Hi Pat, Hope you feel better soon. By the way, nice to see you back in town again, though I wish it were under different circumstances... Slackware 10 is great! Keep up the good work (if you can). Got slack? Korey M Fargo, ND Slackware user since 1994
I strongly suggest taking acidophilus pills or similar while on any antibiotic to ensure it doesn't screw up your digestive system too badly, and keep taking them for a few weeks after treatment is complete.
WARNING: I am not a doctor. Do not take anything from here down as medical advice....
To the author:
I noticed you didn't mention having taken any -mycin family antibiotics. If the diagnosis is correct, something in that family should probably be combined with penecillin, from what I've read.
You should also have yourself checked to see if you have any diseases that mess with your immune system. A blood test should be able to detect AIDS, leukemia, etc. if present. Unlikely, but it can't hurt to be cautious in cases where the diagnosis is so murky.
That said, my hunch is that, through knowing too much, you're instinctively combining symptoms of multiple problems into one, resulting in the appearance of a problem far worse than the actual issue. The white plaque-like bits are likely dried mucus, and the yellow ones, probably the same. The popping feeling and chest pain is probably caused by large amounts of post-nasal drip and chest congestion. I get it all the time, though not to anywhere near the degree you describe. It is usually allergic rather than bacterial. And your back pain could easily be explained by posture while using a computer.
My advice: do yourself a favor and go back to where you grew up for a few weeks. Get some fresh air, get on prescription allergy meds if you feel any facial pressure, do another round of antibiotics if your doctor thinks it makes sense, and if you're having trouble breathing, aerosolized corticosteroids (asthma inhaler) might be needed temporarily until you're over this.
That said, I am not a doctor, and you should not take this as medical advice.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Did you even RTFA?
Not all of it, no. But it doesn't matter. If the ER he's gone to doesn't admit him and he thinks they're wrong, he needs to go to the ER of a hospital where they're not going to brush him off if he's not a run-of-the-mill disease. And if a place like that doesn't exist in Podunk North Dakota, he needs to go to a real hospital.
I don't know any doctors who would implicitly trust someone's internet self-diagnosis.
Surely someone from the hordes of Ximian or other people in Boston can spot him a bed so he can go to Mass General or something similar in New York.
Prescribing any medication for someone over the phone - especially for an infection refractory to initial medical care is wrong and will do more to hurt Patrick than help him. Believe me. There are proper protocols for this and they work well. Get him to a hospital where weird stuff is regularly seen (any large medical center) and get him into the ER.
Of course my post may now be lost do to the grammer Natzis
That would be "grammar" and "Nazis," you idiot.
-spelling Nazi
I will also keep you in my prayers.
Btw, I run Slack9.1 on my laptop and appreciate very much all that you have done for the Linux community.
I've been there -- so desparate I'd ask slashdot for help if I thought it could possibly provide any -- it's not a fun spot to be in.
All he's asked for is help thinking through the predicament and perhaps expedited treament by those who are in a position to lend a hand.
Since you clearly have no intention of helping him to either, why don't you shut the fuck up.
Jackass.
If you never make mistakes, it's probably because you're not doing anything.
/BEGIN_MORAL_RANT /END_MORAL_RANT
The only thing he's done wrong is not get worked up about his illness fast enough. He saw doctors, he engaged them, he went to hospitals, told everything was OK, and went home like a goog little HMO paitent. After all this is done (and after a resolution is in sight for him) he's posting online. Good for him.
Now... Fargo is populated by old people, a ton of old people. I'm a student up at the North Dakota State University and the area has execlent medical care. Not only because of old people and their need for doctors, but because it's the only large medical center next to the U of Minn campuses. I had some problems myself up here last year, and I found something out: the majority of doctors who are the head of their departments in various hospitals have all been trained and spent many many years working at Rochester. (I've also been there, the quality of care is damn near the same).
Patrick - If you're reading this, get the care you need here if you can. Though I'm sure you know this since your from the area. Anything that they need to get from minnesota they can have shipped here in hours.
Peace All - Simrook
'Truth' is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it...
NOT WORK-SAFE CURRENTLY!!
"We need a fourth law of Robotics: Stop Fingering My Wife"
It's bacteria you clod.
"The object of war is not to die for your country, but to make the other bastard die for his." - Patton
Indeed. Back in 1996 I nicked myself shaving while in Texas on a conference. The next day it was all nasty and infected, but I thought "Hmmm, I'll get it treated on monday after I get back to Minnesota."
By the time I had gotten home the infection had spread further, and I spent the next 4 days in the hospital under observation, with an IV of antibiotics and feeling like complete crap. Took me over two months to really recover.
Seriously, leave the doctoring to MD's (google is *not* your friend when it comes to medicine), and make a bee-line to a doctor if you suspect you are ill.
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlineplus/ency/article/00 0074.htm
The organisms that cause this disease are normally found in the mouth and gastrointestinal tract, where they do not usually cause harm. Poor dental hygiene and dental abscess can predispose people to facial lesions and lung infections caused by these bacteria.
Actinomycosis in the lungs causes lung cavities, lung nodules, and pleural effusions. The infection can cross the normal tissue boundaries of the chest producing for example, draining sinuses through the muscles and skin of the chest wall. The disease is rare and may occur at any age, but most affected patients are 30-60 years old.
Be sure to check out the link on pleural effusions. Sounds pretty right-on to his descripton.
I am not a doctor. Please don't pay attention to my post, but consider it before you write off this as being anything else.
Are you sure that these are sulfer lung granules? There are similar yellow, nasty smelling granules that are formed as a result of food getting stuck behind your tonsil. These things are pretty small (as described), and if they are not expelled they continue to grow and can cause a sore throat. Clearing your throat can help expel them (as described), or if you say ahh into a mirror you can usually see them. When you say ahh, try to bring your Adam's Apple all the way forward so that your tonsils come as close together as possible. Look where the little flap of skin covers over the tonsil, you should be able to see two little holes. You can then remove them with a dull toothpick or something like that if they are bothering you.
I get these pretty regularly. I just want to make sure that you do not get diagnosed based on a red herring.
Good Luck!
Phigs
It's time for doctors to begin facing up to the fact that they must accept the help of tools such as Google and the net to be able to do their jobs - to be able to correctly diagnose illnesses. The smartest doctor in the world cannot compare to the average inquisitive doctor who recognizes this.
...I'm an australian who lived in the states for a while...while our health system is far from the best in the world (long queues for public hospital), you can generally go to a GP for free, and, if your symptoms are life threatening, you'll generally get straight into a public hospital...which brings me to my observations of the two systems...
HMOs don't work!
How can't you put a company, whose bottom line is profit and cost reduction, in charge of peoples health...it does not work...every day you hear more stories about it not working.
SO FOR CRYING OUT LOUD...GET MAD!!!!!!!!!
any one of you could be in a similar situation...and then it will be too late...make some noise that you want the system changed...get your friends to make noise...hell, do something radical...but don't allow health care to become a right of the wealthy...because guess what, if you get sick, you won't be able to work...and you won't be too wealthy then...and you'll have to do whatever the HMOs tell you to because you won't be able to take care of things yourself.
HMOs have it in the bag, because the only time you'll dispute their position, is when you have no bargaining power...you don't like their decision..they can quite happily say "ok, well, how about you die then"...I'm pretty sure your bargaining power is screwed at that point...for god sake Americans...dispute it now, while you're still in a state too.
Health is a right, not a comodity. This will not get better by itself...and for those about to argue that free market forces will sort it all out...it's suprising how little shopping around one does when they're hooked up to a life support machine.
So for god sake...MAKE SOME NOISE...CHANGE THE SYSTEM...before you don't have a chance to.
I'm not a doctor but I'm married to a pathologist and have worked with a number of infectious disease specialists directly. Given that Patrick is relatively close to Minnesota, if he can't get the problem licked in SD, he should get over to the Mayo Clinic. They are one of the locations where hospitals from around the world (even the big ones like Barnes-Jewish in Saint Louis and the Cleveland Clinic) send unusual microbiology samples for diagnosis. If Mayo cannot help him, probably no one can. They've got very good people and as good a clinical pathology lab as anywhere in the world.
I wrote Patrick to tell him that I personally suffer the same syntoms that he is going through.
I've been to see a specialist and he told me that this is related to not taking care of your teeth.
Below is a copy of the letter that I sent him:
Patrick,
My god, I'm reading the post you post on Slashdot and by god if I don't have the same thing. I've had this problem for YEARS and I mean like 10 years. Just to let you know, here are my symptoms. I have a somewhat like hole in my left tonsel. It use to be about once a month I would have this pain on that side of my throat. Somethimes this yellow or green hard stuff would come out of it. If it built up to much it would make me feel like my throat was going to close and also me cough. Now being a smoker, I thought that maybe it was throat cancer or something. However I'm only 28 so the chances of that are highly unlikly. This went on for I would say about 5 years until I finally went to a throat specialist down here in Boca Raton, FL.
Well here was the diagnose that he told me. This is a more common problem than you think. ALOT of people have this. What causes it? Not brushing your teeth, believe it or not. He told me that it is a bateria that builds up in your throat from food and what not. Brushing, flossing and rising takes care of the problem. You will never get totally rid of it and probably will have to live with it for the rest of your life like me. The thing is that ever since he told me this, I brush and floss on a daily basis. If I miss brushing my teeth for even one day, my throat feels and screwed up again. So naturally I make sure that I brush and floss at least twice a day.
For stuff in my throat, he told me that while I'm in the shower to stick my finger down where the hole is and to squeeze the crap out of it at least 3 times a week. It's a little disgusting, but what the hell, I don't have that feeling anymore and no more pain.
Personally if I were you I would do the same thing. Squeeze that crap out of your throat and make sure that you brush and floss your teeth twice a day. Make sure you FLOSS, brushing gets your teeth white, but flossing is what prevents all the diseases and what not that are gum related. You would be amazed it you did a search on Google for diseases that are related to people not taking care of their teeth. It's probably the easy way to prevent alot of the diseases that people have and they never do it.
I hope this helps you out. Good luck with everything and again, brush and floss your teeth brother. Go do it now!
cell phone and email in last paragraph...
And no, none of us are doctors. He needs to stop self medicating with antibiotics (which it sounds like he's doing a lot, and badly), and get to a specialist who can properly identify his disease and prescribe a cure. If he's lucky, the popping in his head was his sinus clearing. Either way, he might succeed at killing himself if he continues to mistreat himself so ignorantly.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
Ooh, a Wikipedia link, watch for that page to be repeatedly defaced for the next few hours....
...and, of course, it was.
See, this is what I'm always telling folks. "On Slashdot, the readership is part of the technological intelligentsia. They're smarter than the average reader, so the level of discourse is high."
Sometimes, I can even say it with a straight face.
- Peter Ravn Rasmussen
Give the man a break... I've seen a lot of criticism in these posts directed at Patrick for several reasons, including the following:
1. For sending a plea to the internet for help
2. For switching doctors
3. For bombarding himself with antibiotics
4. For trying to self-diagnose himself
5. For not saving everything he coughed up.
Give the man a break people. Stop criticizing and show some sympathy. He has been sick for a long time now, and he is obviously frustrated. There is nothing wrong with asking others for help or ideas that he can take to his doctor.
Having been through two major issues that doctors took 2-3 years to correctly diagnose, I can relate. My 8-year battle with a stomach/digestion/IBS issue (which I'm told now is untreatable) and my past equilibrium/inner ear/dizziness issues were not caught and treated until I switched doctors after 2 years of searching of an answer. In both cases, all my tests (blood, upper/lower G.I.s, etc, etc) came back negative over the years. The tests all said that I am healthy. It wasn't until I started keeping detailed symptom logs (and diet logs) and started searching on my own that I was able to convince my doctor(s) to try other solutions and we found better solutions together.
For example, on the dizziness issue, I always asked if my seasonal allergy mediation might be to blame. My doctor (and pharmacist) always told me that it was not my allergy medication. After two years and a home move I switched pharmacists, but kept the same doctor. This new pharmacist told me and gave me printed clinical proof that some of the side-effects of this medicine were dizziness and, in extreme cases, loss of equilibrium and joint and back pain (all of these were symptoms of mine). Armed with this new information I proceeded back to my doctor and he took me off the allergy medicine. Within a month I was back to normal. Again, this was after two years of tests, probes, and unfortunately doctor prescribed antibiotics to try and treat my illness (any idea why antibodies are prescribed so much?)
Oh, one more issue (and this is a little gross)... about once a month, due to my stomach "issues", I either crap blood or occasionally barf up something gross. In the EIGHT years that this has been going on, I have not collected each and every extraction to take to my doctors. I've caught a few over the years (all negative/normal), but the gut reaction to anything like this is to flush or rinse it down. So, when Pat says in the post that he coughed up yellow stinky stuff.... lay off him for not taking everything that comes out of him to a doctor for tests. That gets old for your doctor really quickly.
So, in summary, give the man a break and wish him well, and if you do have USEFUL help or suggestions for him, please provide them.
Pat.... I wish you the best of luck. Don't give up on your doctors. Make sure that they keep testing. Follow the good advice you receive for people (but mainly your doctors). Document everything if possible and only if you feel up to it. Also, multiple sources of information help doctors make decisions (I think others have already mentioned this). I sincerely hope you get the treatment, rest, and relaxation that you need. The Slackware community will still be here when you get back on your feet.
Good Luck and Get Well Soon!!!
Regards,
-from a loyal Slackware user/subscriber
(user since v3.2 / subscriber since v8.1)
(void) signal(SIGALRM, (alarm_fired=1)); if (alarm_fired) printf("Revoke is clueless!\n");
Er, disregard judgmental comment please. He says he's been using the antibiotics properly. I'm sorry.
Much luck getting to your specialist.
There are no trails. There are no trees out here.
The guy DID went to see many doctors many times and he is not doing this to play doctor. Because previous doctors weren't able to put the finger on what he have so he decided to write an account of his symptoms on the web and then, if someone can point to what he have he will go to see a specialist about that. He is also suspicious about a condition called "Actinomycosis" and because it's a rare infection he want to reach as many specialists to help him take a decisions on what doctor he should go to see. Going to the ER will do nothing for him, he already did it many times so people, please RTFA and stop commenting stupid stuff.
Yahh, hiii haaaaa! -Major Kong, from Dr. Strangelove
The Mayo Clinic is a great resource for problems that are somewhat out of the ordinary, they stay well abrest of all the latest things and almost seem to specialize in anything out of the ordinary.
Also, don't give up hope. I had an infection in my leg that came from "soil bacteria" according to the doctor. In a little less than two hours I went from nothing to being afraid that my leg was going to split like an overcooked hot dog. The first course of antibiotics stopped the rapid growth but it wasn't long before the bacteria regained their foothold (sorry, that pun wasn't intended) and I was unable to even put on a pair of pants! The little blood vessels on the surface were tearing apart and I had bloody spiderwebs all over my lower leg. Attempts at lancing only produced pain.
Hot whirlpool baths were an attempt to raise the local temp high enough to kill some of the bacteria felt like someone was running a belt sander and torch against my leg but the bacteria kept winning.
The decision was made to amputate my leg. One last try with an anti-biotic cocktail was tried and lo and behold, it worked. I came within just a few hours and the magic bullet was found.
That was about ten years ago. I still have the scars on my leg and there are spots where the infection ate so much away that it is pitted but it is fully functional.
Once you get the right doctor, who is willing to try old and new and pull out all of the stops, your odds are good.
The usual problem with antibiotics is going off them too fast, leaving the 1% that's most resistant behind to repopulate.
The other similar problem is using too low a dose, which has similar effects.
Neither of these obviously applied in this case. It was a generic dose of a generic antibiotic, which may not be sufficiently effective for the pathogen in question, but it's not going to cause a big disaster. Certainly not compared to the initial dose.
In general, yes, I do agree that things like codeine that can only hurt the taker need to be a lot less regulated, and antibiotics that can cause public health issues that hurt others need to be a lot more regulated.
While I can appreciate the problem he's having, I also see several signs of something else... Panic Attacks. I have relatives who've gone to ER over them and I've had some symptoms myself at stressful times. Until you experience it, it's hard to understand/believe. To me (and I am not a doctor) this guy seems to need a small dose of valium followed by continued treatment for the infection - or whatever his doctors agree it is.
BTW, Xanax can also help take the edge off anxiety, but I've seen what appear to be withdrawl symptoms last for months or years after it is stopped (not abruptly either).
This is just my opinion, don't listen to me.
I use Slackware 10 - it is excellent.
Is this a kosher document? I can't see a guy like Patrick 'googling' for a health problem at all. I really don't.
If it is, I hope the Internet world can help.
But now, if it happened to the 'other' guy, it would be different. The new MSN search engine would pull up results from MSKDB. The appeal would come in spontaneous e-mails "Hi There. Can you help? Please click my_x-rays.zip"
With regard to "lung plaque" - Everyone is aspirating oral bacteria into their lungs on a daily basis. People with a normal immune system don't have a problem with it. I don't think that your fancy electric toothbrush had anything to do with the material that you were expectorating. The pain you describe could be cardiac and absence of evidence of a PE is reassuring. Anxiety can also cause those symptoms. Unlikely to be pericarditis - usually is positional and has EKG changes. Would recommend that you raise concern of your heart and possibly anxiety with your doctor. Good luck.
Stop trying to diagnosis and treat yourself and find a good doctor.
Google will NOT save or cure you. An MD will.
First distro was slackware, way the heck back when.
Not a religious man, but I hope he's OK, and I'm glad the community is involved and maybe can help.
No expert myself, but it sounds like he needs to drive up to Mayo, kick over the triage desk, and refuse to leave until they cut the red tape for him. His descriptions of his problems make me think nobody should be making this guy wait "till Friday" for anything.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
Wish I could help... Best of luck to you!
His mention of Levaquin reminded me of another user's JE on yeast infections. Some good stuff there. Not to mention that quinolones (PDF link) have an anecdotal history of being some nasty stuff.
-"...bad old ideas look confusingly fresh when they are packaged as technology" - Jaron Lanier (Digital Maoism on Edge.o
This brings up a question that I had in reading his posting.
Wouldn't prednisone be like the last thing you would want to give someone with a potentially serious infection?
I thought to ask because I know that with tick-born diseases [which tend to lead to similar patient-doctor difficulties] it is one of the more common treatment-screwups along the way. Based on your last sentence, I'm assuming you're saying what [it seems like] his various doctors were thinking: It's psychosomatic or autoimmune...
And the latter is why prednisone?
Sigh, I know what a position this kinda thing puts MD's in, but I also know that [at least inregards to tick-born infection/coinfection] those two diagnosis' are often a clinical manifestation of the MD's hubris [;)] and/or frustration.
PS Jane, you ignorant sl, er I mean Patrick, find a Doctor that you TRUST and let them manage the treatment/diagnosis! Be proactive and educate yourself, but you need to stick with someone! Think of it like this: Right now you're killing and then execing a new doctor process based on a an uneducated guess at how to health-chech the running process, and the data is on a big slow tape device... You'd rather be letting a doctor [who has source access] exec() specialists, or in the case of a place like Mayo, pthread_create emTIA
For whatever it's worth:
As a child (from age 5 up to 14-15) I used to suffer a lot from streptococcal sore throats and was regularly prescribed daily injections of extencillin (very high dose of penicillin - 2400000 units per injection made in Eastern Europe and Russia) in sets of 10-12, which absolutely decimated my intestinal flora. To offset these effects I was told to drink milk and eat plain yogurt (kefir is even better) daily. I am 33 now and haven't had any residual issues from these treatments.
I'm going to relay some advice from an MD friend of mine. Scream your head off.
Your symptoms sound gravely serious, and if anyone is telling you to wait "until Friday" don't take that for an answer.
One thing I had a hard time understanding until I ran into it is the triage system at major medical centers. If you are walking and talking, you are not an emergency, and that is often not cool. When you have unusual amount of self-composure or stoicism it can literally kill you. I've been through this myself, I know what I'm talking about.
If I were you I would get in a car and head straight to Mayo and not stop making a scene until I got the full and undivided attention of an expert. And by that I mean someone who can get you your antibiotics in 5 minutes with a phone call. Don't worry about being a GOMER. It's your life, man.
Want to Know How to Cheat the GPL? Read On!
InternationalCow felt some of the poster's complained might have a psychiatric etiology. Acute attacks of pain, feeling like the world is coming to the end, chest pain, etc could represent panic attacks. Even if the symptoms are not from a primary psychiatric etiology, treatment with some psychotropic medication like anti-depressants could decrease his anxiety, improve his mood and increase his energy level.
The thing you have to remember about this is that doctors are being barraged with malpractice suits these days. The reason they follow established practices even when the patient becomes frustrated and insults them for it, is because if they deviate from that practice, then they have less defense in the case that the patient in question turns around later and files a malpractice suit when things don't turn out the right way, and if they are declared guilty of malpractice, their insurance company won't cover the losses if they were found to be deviant. Why would a MD invite trouble that way?
Of course, if all the sue-happy buffoons would chill out a little bit, maybe MDs would be more willing to go out on a limb, but unfortunately that's not the state of things these days.
LRC, the best-read libertarian site on the web
-PS
"All that is necessary for evil to succeed is for good men to do nothing." - Edmund Burke
A good university or teaching hospital would be good, Mayo would be good, a small community 20 bed hospital probably would not be good.
The bacteria are chewing up stuff that will never grow back. Even if you "get better", every hour these little bastards are nibbling on you may represent months shaved off your lifespan.
Yes, your insurance may not cover it. Yes, it might turn out to be nothing. Over the past year, we have admitted my mother to the hospital 6 times and 4 of those times turned out to be nothing, and 2 times saved her life. Those are pretty good odds. Further, the stuff you learn about the hospital now might save your life a few years down the road - and lead to some open-source aids for the rest of us!
But first, you need to stay on the road. Get help now, don't wait for an appointment, the bacteria aren't. Head for the ER and let them look at you; have one of your parents and your friends collect the history and medical information the doctors might need later.
If you need to hear it from a doctor, my wife the Internal Medicine doctor will be home at 5pm PST. But I hope you are already admitted by that time.
Keith Lofstrom server-sky.com
If he's been doing his research, and judging by the amount of specialists he's seen, I'm surprised he hasn't mentioned pulmonary actinomycosis. The lack of stringent dental hygeine is significant, as that does increase the chances of contracting it by quite a large measure - the condition also causes 'lung nodules' like he describes.
;)
Those pressure release's he's getting could be a sign of severe/agitated pleural effusion, where the collections of fluid are forming pockets and perhaps 'popping' into the pleura itself, though if he did indeed get one 'inside his head' then I would be gravely concerned - as I would be with anything to do with any release of pressure inside the head. What that could mean is beyond the range of my knowledge, I'm afraid, but the one thing I do know is that anything like that going on should be treated immediately, not when it's convenient for the nearest ID Doc. As for the releases of pressure in the chest cavity, I think he'll probably be OK until his appointment if he doesn't try to do anything drastic between now and his appointment, though don't take that in any way as a qualified medical opinion. Other than that all I can offer in the way of advice is that he should ensure he always has someone nearby who can call 911 if something major does kick off before Friday.
I'd also like to wish you the best of luck, Patrick - and it can't hurt to have a whole community behind you, now can it?
Oh, and what's it like for a Linux guru being stuck on AOL dialup?
Dealing with lawyers would be a lot less tedious if they all looked like Casey Novak.
I have the same thing. I have been on cipro several times, then the little funky balls of yellow crap I cough up every once in a while, and hurting comes back. My local doctor never tried penicillin as a long term treatment. Thanks slashdot for calling it to my attention, thanks patrick for doing the research. I am off to see my doctor, no this is not a joke.
I remember moving to slackware from TAMU shortly after i found out about slackware, like _10_ years ago.
:)
:)
Through an odd and circuitous route, i find myself in Fargo, ND, where Patrick, who is for many, the "founder" of using linux at home, is currently residing.
Ironially enough, i moved to fargo by way of Microsoft employment (Microsoft Great Plains), and find that one of the biggest names in linux is here in town
I just asked a co-worker about it and naturally the computer people in town all kind of know each other; he said a friend of his sisters was patricks' roommate for a while. If you search on the name Voldkering with the word Fargo, you get the business address of some dentists, and at first i was like "thats not right" until i read that his parents were dentists
It's a small world.
My opinions are my own, and do not necessarily represent those of my employer.
Hey, I like Slackware a lot. I started with slack from a book and kernel 1.2 in 1994. It was all I used until I discovered LFS and then gentoo.
ok, pandering out of the way, now I have to say it:
PV is sounding a bit like a kook in his letter.
First, it is long and rambling and mostly irrelevant. Then he mentions how he prescribed himself a 2 month supply of ciproflaxacin in OCT 2001, now he disagrees with the ABX he is being prescribed and wants to prescribe himself something else. WTF? Throw in this weird "popping and draining" symptom despite CT scans which have not shown abscess, empyema, or much of anything, plus a narative that demonstrates a misunderstanding of some basic medical facts, plus he has been to multiple hospitals and nobody has thought he was sick enough to warrant admission. Sure, doctors make mistakes all the time, but one really starts to wonder how much of this is comming from above the neck.
Anyways, I hope he gets well soon. And remember, a little knowledge can be a dangerous thing.
I'm not a doctor, but I am a pharmacy student taking an antibiotics/infectious disease class right now. My advice is to find an infectious disease specialist somewhere like a university hospital start getting treatment. Most patients that present with a serious infectious disease are placed on empiric therapy (a combination of big drugs like Zosyn, Gentamycin, and Vancomycin) until cultures are grown. They will take sputum cultures and when results come back the antibiotic therapy will be adjusted appropriately.
Looking through my infectious disease handbook, actinomyces does seem to have all the symptoms you describe. It grows optimally under anaerobic conditions, so the lab should be notified if actinomyces is suspected. Growth is slow and possibly nonexistant if antibiotics have been used already. If this bug is correctly identified, the drug of choice is intravenous Penicillin G (10-20 million units per day) for about 3 weeks, followed by high dose oral penicillin.
Bottom line: Talk to an ID specialist and tell him or her your story. State that you are suspecting actinomyces, then get some cultures grown and start antibiotic therapy.
Hope you get better Patrick!
"Software is like sex. It's better when it's free." -Linus Torvalds
I had Guillain Barre' syndrome. I had pain in the lower back and tingling, weakness, and increased numbness in all extremities.
The "doctor" (an MD) was convinced I had a kidney stone, though nothing except my gender and age would indicate that.
As my pain increased and paralysis increased, the "doctor" scheduled me for a gastrointestinal ultrasound. The day of the ultrasound I was basically paralyzed, yet the "doctor" would not accept my urgent, emergency phone calls asking her to see me or to get me some neurological testing.
I finally got another doctor to refer me to a neurologist who diagnosed me in fifteen minutes and had me immediately checked into intensive care. I spent a week in intensive care, completely paralyzed and iv'd down $50,000 in gamma globulin.
So respectfully, doc,
GO FUCK YOURSELF AND YOUR ARROGANCE AND CONDESCENSION.
someday, I hope sooner than later, we can fix our national structural problems in providing health care and affordable medicine. and it isn't going to be done by allowing wall street weasels to take all the money.
right now, as in R F N, if you feel things popping inside, if you are coughing up funny chunks, if you can't breathe and that elephant is dancing on your chest, you must call 911 or get to a local emergency room as soon as possible, preferably NOT under your own power, in case that runs out while you're pulling up to the crosswalk at the school.
palliative care while diagnosing the root cause is always better than no care at all. and much better than playing doctor with reduced faculties and no instruments.
if this is supposed to be a new economy, how come they still want my old fashioned money?
All these geeks trying their hand at medical diagnosis.
Here's why computer programmers shouldn't be physicians:
"OK, we're going to shut the patient down and bring up his systems one by one."
-S
I'm writing in general, about engineers and computer scientists (guys especially) who think that the heuristics of their profession give them any extra advantage over the general public in self-diagnosing illnesses. Its the opposite-- your tools and knowledge, so good for your profession, can harm you when it comes to medical treatment.
Yes, medicine itself is still primative, we've only just built MRIs that can see metabolism by imaging C,N and O on top of H20. Medical error is a leading cause of death. Doctors can believe that real illnesses aren't just psychological - it took medicine a while to accept that bacteria caused ulcers. Sometimes unpatented, ordinary vitamins help with a major symptom of a major illness (and if you have or know someone with diabetes- read the research and go get some benfotiamine!). Medicine is like that.
But the heuristics of medicine are far better than any other for dealing with illnesses. Non-medical common sense is orthogonal to medicine- if it gives good results that's just luck. But given how easily people are helped by placebos, how good are we going to be at telling if a particular treatment is working or not? Given how we can tune out outside signals when working on something (like the need to eat or drink), how often are we going to miss far more subtle clues? Given how personal psychology can make it hard to admit to feeling pain or to talk about body weaknesses (especially guys), how can we make sure that we're telling the doctor all relevant clues? Given how most medical research on the net is in the form of abstracts, not full articles, and given our strong abilities to find patterns (even where there aren't any), how easy is it to be side-tracked into thinking we've diagnosed ourselves when we haven't? Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One's Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments is an intensely applicable article to everyone.
I recently had a relative who died. With Staphylococcus aureus pneumonia your odds aren't good, but they're far worse if you don't know if you have the methicillin sensitive or the methicillin resistant version: the antibiotics for MRSA don't work very well on MSSA (the reverse is, of course, obvious).
Very tiny differences in what illness you have can make big differences in what treatment you need. Only medical tests- not all the reading and self-diagnoses in the world- will find those differences. Making sure you get those tests- that's hacking the medical and insurance system. Thinking you can figure out on your own what you have or whether or not a treatment is working? That's trying to hack your own body, and our self-assessments on how well we do that aren't very good. Our own self-diagnosis system is worse than the one in Windows (and for spaghetti code without any comments see dna).
I commend Patrick for being proactive and trying to self diagnose. Often, it is the determination of the patient that can make the difference in finding out what is wrong.
Two years ago, I self diagnosed a rare skin disease (27 out of 1 million) that my personal physician told me was a bruise. After 4 weeks it did not go away and she said not to worry that it will heal and that it was simply a deep bruise. Well, I did worry. Maybe it was skin cancer or something?! I didn't trust her. So I googled for a few hours and found a hit using "Cliff Drop Borders." My skin patch had this feature and when I googled it, low and behold there was my exact skin patch! It is called Atrophoderma of Passini and Pierini, a form of Morphea. I must say that was a very rewarding experience and I felt so empowered by the internet. This would not have been possible just 20 years ago!
When I returned to the doctor with print outs in hand, all the doctors came in to ask me questions, like they had never seen this case before and were genuinely curious to learn about it, like a was a Martian or something. In fact, they broke out their medical books and verified my findings and agreed with my diagnosis.
As a follow up, I went to see a skin specialist (Harvard Graduate) and while he was impressed that I diagnosed my condition, he scolded me for not demanding to see a specialist sooner. Your normal doctor will probably never be able to diagnose a rare disease. Fortunately, the disease has the same morbidity as the normal population, and often disappears on its own for reasons unknown.
Best of luck to Patrick, keep trying the doctors but there is nothing wrong with working in parallel on your own.
Excuse me, have you seen the state of "modern" healthcare in the US? It's mostly a joke! And you can place most of the blame on HMO like structures and insurance restrictions that control what doctors are able to do for their patients.
For most people, as long as they never get anything hard to diagnose, they will be fine. However, when doctors need to run a series of tests to find a problem, those tests get expensive. And, many insurances/hmos will do whatever they can to block/prevent/refuse those tests.
And, if you don't have insurance, things are even worse.
It is very rare to find a doctor that takes the direct involvement necessary to do thorough testing in order to systematically rule out causes in order to get to a final diagnosis.
Bitter, first-hand experience speaking here. With real insurance, with HMO insurance, and with no insurance. It's possible to get decent medical care, but not easy. The whole system is almost as screwed up as the patent system.
. 62,400 repetitions make one truth -- Brave New World, Aldous Huxley
one of the surest signs you have to do something about it. It is a problem that is stopping you what you normally can do.
'... Being an ex-smoker, worries of lung cancer were starting to consume my thoughtsSo you realise your mortal and you like living. Nothing wrong there.
Now for the sermon: get someone to find out what is wrong. don't stop until your satisfied. get another practioner if they give you the bums rush or cant be bothered to solve your problem.
repeat after me programmers, hackers: Look after the health of your system and yourself. I dont want to read another opensource contributor obituary.
Well Patrick - get yourself well. write it up and I'll promise to get a full commercial version of slack instead of the cheapscate versions I usually get :)
peterrenshaw ~ Another Scrappy Startup
He went to the wrong doctors. When dealing with a bacterial infection, you need an INFECTIOUS DISEASE SPECIALIST. You can find them associated with large medical centers. Bacteria are hard to defeat, they can be tolerant of antibiotics, so a multi-drug therapy has to be used. Bacteria can encyst themselves when exposed to a hostile environment, to reappear later. All cysts must be drained. This can be minor surgery when they are in muscles, or major surgery when involving a major organ (like a lung). This isn't to be played around with, they can easily kill. Most doctors don't have the knowledge to treat them. Get to an INFECTIOUS DISEASE SPECIALIST immediately! There aren't that many of them, and most are associated with large institutions or university teaching hospitals. Get on it now, your life is in jeopardy.
Hey /. I've been having this lung trouble lately. I've passed out a couple times, and my arms have turned blue. I'm waiting for your responses, and I'll be driving to the Doctor's office next week. Thanks in advance.
Get well soon, Patrick Volkerding.
SAILING MISHAP
I have renewed faith in the slashdot community. (Or were all those messages modded down already?)
Good luck, Patrick. Remember, laughter is the best medicine - but sometimes penicillin is needed.
From Google: yellow lung granule
Lung for sale
Low Priced Lung.
Big Selection! (aff)
ebay.co.uk
being moved by the medical run-around story, and
what will become a need for funds, I just sent some
cash via paypal, who's never heard of
volkerdi#slackware.... So if Pat does not activate
his inbound paypal cash, have I lost it forever ?
Get well soon - if you can find a decent MD.
From what I read till now:
a) Actinomyces israelii is anaerobic. So, hyperbaric oxygen is bad for it. You know, enter a pressurized chamber with oxygen. You're gonna have fun.
b) Prognostic is good, but treatment is painfully slow. You'll use penicillin but probably will also go under surgery to remove disease agglomerates form your lungs. At least, this is what I've read (and Medicine in Brazil is quite advanced). Google for "actinomicose pulmonar", at least you can see the pics.
c) I don't if it will happen to you, but there is a facial variety. You get lumps, much like if a big wasp had bitten you. Your skin eventually tears (this is called a fistula) and you can see a red tissue. I hope you can avoid this.
More info as I come by. Get well. Damn, next time be sure to know the _reason_ why things happen!
Some details can be found here on what this is.
I was weened on Slackware and think it's still one of the premier distro's. From what I have been able to find it seems that this is something that can be treated successfully, but it takes prompt action and perseverence. So if the next few slackware releases are a little late, please try to be understanding.
While googling, I noticed this possible problem:
3 409525&CFTOKEN=80392860
http://www.ashp.org/shortage/penicillin.cfm?CFID=
Basically, it says that Pfizer had a problem making enough of the drug, and more isn't expected till December. There are a few other suppliers, but they have problems as well. This was posted in July, I hope the situation is better at the moment.
Microsoft has just released their much anticipated hands-free cordless mouse. Warning, it may hurt a little at first.
"Patients who present late in the disease process tend to have a poor outcome." Get well, good luck, I wish you the best as it sounds like this is a late presentation. As someone who's spent time in the hospital on IV antibiotics, I hope your veins don't get sensitive to the IVs like mine did. At first the insertion sites lasted for days but later they'd become inflamed in very little time. Prepare to become a human pincushion :-(. They can put IV needles in places you don't want to know...
$#!^ happens, but why does it always have to happen to me???
If you're on longterm treatment, definitely take acidophilus supplements. Another good idea if you're not doing that ('cuz it's relatively short term) or you want to supplement it: yogurt contains acidophilus cultures. Eat a shitload of it.
Actually, recent studies have shown that taking acidophilus after antibiotics doesn't actually have any more benefical action than to make your stools firmer.
I still take the stuff after food poisoning / antibiotics though. Because who wants loose stools?
Coming soon - pyrogyra
"allowing the bacteria in question to get into the bloodstream more easily through the cuts in the gums that occur when you floss like you're supposed to"
I think it's safe to say that's a fallacy since healthy gums don't bleed during proper brushing and flossing. At least a fallacy in the "horse is already out of the barn" sense. If your gums are bleeding that easily, you've GOT to get into your dentist to return them to a healthy state ASAP. And if your gums bleed from brushing you've got SERIOUS problems.
If you've gotten to that point then you're likely in for a "deep cleaning". It will hurt, but it's the only way to scrape away all the crap and give your gums a chance to heal.
How do I know this? Been there, done that. Night and day difference. So get a deep cleaning and from then on get your twice-annual maintenance cleaning. Brush GENTLY and floss regularly. No more bleeding gums, no more $1000 crowns.
BTW folks shouldn't be brushing hard either - you can erode the gum line in extreme cases. It's supposed to be a moderate "massaging" action with a soft toothbrush. Ask your dental hygenist, they'll be happy to show how it's done.
I fractured my spine on a speed boat (don't ask) which caused an odd pain in my stomach. The doc in a box that examined and xrayed me told me that back injuries commonly cause phantom stomach pain like I was experiencing.
A while back I was dealing with constant low grade fevers, nausea, dizzy spells and crippling fatigue. I didn't even realize I had fevers until I started monitoring my temperature and realized I was always around or just under 100. I went to two doctors, none of whom could find anything wrong with me; blood tests seemed normal (personally I think they rely too much on blood tests, it's as if they just give up when they don't give them an answer). This sort of thing came and went for about a year, until it finally became too much to bear, the fevers shot up to 102 or so and I'd get frequent chills.
Then all of a sudden I got a terrible toothache. I had a wisdom tooth that had broken years ago and now all of a sudden it was hurting. I had it pulled ($200), took some antibiotics the surgeon gave me and within a week all these symptoms vanished. I did mention the tooth to the doctors I saw but they didn't think much of it. I don't know for sure if that was the problem but it seems that way to me.
Let's face it, he caught something WEIRD! The real question is *why*?
Something fragged his immune system. When a person's immune system goes haywire they can catch just about anything. The "popping and draining" that he described is prolly his overclocked lymph nodes.
IANAD, nor do I normally play one on Slashdot but I'd hope that his doc would check for the following:
Lupus
Luekemia
Perhaps other folks, here, know more auto-immune ailments or diseases than I do.
Anyone else think Volkerding ought to fatten up? He sound pretty skinny!
Nice work everyone who vandalised the wikipedia page. You're the people who made Slashdot what it is today. Fucktards.
fish and pipes
After that, he gave me amoxicillin (because it was cheap and I was a student.) Slight improvement, then relapse. Doxicycline. No go. Erythromicin. Slight improvement, then relapse. Sulfa. Allergic. Cithromax. No go. And, finally, Clindamycin, which, after five months of this, had me on my feet in less than 24 hours. Clindmycin is well-known for killing people by colitis upon occasion, but given that I was getting steadily worse at that point, I would say it was definitely worth the risk.
It was some sort of anaerobe which was apparently very hard to get a culture of, but which was delighted to live in various portions of my anatomy.Erm. I can only assume that English is your second language. I wouldn't presume to correct any of your other mistakes, but I think the word you wanted was 'physician' and not 'physicist'.
Abusing antibiotics can be somewhat nasty. Not being given them can be just as nasty.
I used to be prone to sinus infections. Each time I moved and got a new doctor, I would go through the cycle: go in, tell the doctor I had a sinus infection. Doctor would say, 'Oh, it's just a virus.' I would tell him he was wrong, and then be sent home. I'd come back in a week, he'd take a culture, and three or four days later I'd go back in for a followup and get my antibiotic. It usually only took a couple of repetitions of this with each new doctor to convince them that I knew what a sinus infection looked like for me. But for the first couple of times, I would be incapacitated for a week and a half or so, and the infection would have spread to my chest and that would linger for another week afterward.
And that's just in a non-life-threatening situation. If something is getting really nasty and rapidly worsening, you throw what you can at it in the hopes that something will stick, because if you don't, then your patient ends up dead, and that doesn't help anyone any.
-fred
Sign #11 of Slashdot overdose: You see the phrase 'moderate Republican' and you wonder if that would be a +1 or a -1.
The solution to your problem is deceptively simple, and no, it does not involve the use of a pistol.
Please read this through in its entirety. You will have to purchase 2 products and it is not a replacement for antibiotics or conventional therapy but I will GUARANTEE that it will help things immeasurably.
Your problem is that you're full of shit. No, literally, you are, but you don't realize it. See, I, like you once was wracked with infection after infection that wouldn't go away and the doctors were clueless because they could only treat symptoms and they couldn't treat them fast enough.
Simply put, you need to start with a colon cleanse. Hear me out.
As a fellow nerd, I know that we don't eat healthy. I mainly lived on Mountain Dew and solar power for, oh, about 10 years. What happens, especially in America is that we don't eat enough fiber and the walls of your intestine get coated with sludge. This creates a problem as toxins that are filtered out of our system are emptied into the intestine to be carried off. When the walls get coated, they can't dump toxins into your body efficiently and you start to clog up. Your body will then store the toxins in your liver, kidneys and lungs and every other cell in your body for that matter.
This buildup of toxins exhibits itself differently in different people. Some get tired, some get infections. Chronic fatigue? Yup.. that too.
Now, this is not the solution, in and of itself. Cleansing the colon only enables your body to start purging the toxins that are in the body and prevent further buildup. You will not be able to get rid of the infection you have until you open up your internal "Toxic Waste Dump".
The best place to get a colon cleanse kit is www.colonblow.com. I love that place, they treat the whole issue with a bit of humor. Their email address? Flushtwice@colonblow.com. They sell a kit that will clean you out in 72 hours and it doesn't even hurt. You'll be amazed at the stuff that comes out.
Once you've opened up the toxic waste dump, go to www.vitaganza.com and order some Wobenzym. I recommend getting the 800 count bottle as you'll go through the 200 count bottle in about a week as you start cleansing. Better yet, start off with their "Pollution Pack" which includes other nutrients that will help you out.
Wobenzym will help "chew up" infections and all other waste in your body and get them out of your body. Wobenzym is simply enzymes. I'll paste here a snippet from their website www.wobenzym.com:
"Enzymes are proteins composed of amino acids, the basic building blocks of life, arranged in chains that spontaneously fold into three-dimensional structures. These three-dimensional structures confer specificity of function. Whereas all enzymes are proteins, not all proteins are enzymes. Enzymes are involved in nearly all metabolic and physiological processes in the body. Thus, they are a key in the maintenance of a strong immune system, a robust cardiovascular tree,a healthy and intact central nervous system, and optimal hormonal balance in the body."
Wobenzym is simply enzymes, about 20 of them that once ingested create a cascading set of 2000 enzymes. These enzymes are then used to cleanse the body.
Now, this does not replace the antibiotics, but I will tell you that all the antibiotics in the world will not help anything until you have a cleared "pathway" in your body for the toxins and infections to leave your body.
Once you have completed the colon cleanse, and started Wobenzym, you will continue to poop, and poop, and poop. You will wonder where the heck all that crap is coming from but I can guarantee that you will feel better. I feel great now and I know that I wouldn't feel this good if I didn't take this same course of remedy.
I guarantee that if you do these two simple things that your body will then start getting rid of the infection that you're suffering from, and the antibiotics will have a much greater impact on your system in helping you fight this battle.
Regards,
Joel R. Helgeson
Good security is based upon reality and common sense. Common sense is a function of having common knowledge.
That said...
I moved to NC, near Duke University, for work and to get treatment. I recommend the Duke health system as the best in the world.
This mentions "anecdotal evidence" of hyperbaric oxygen usefulness:a l/section13/c hapter157/157e.jsp
c tion13/c hapter157/157e.jspe plus/ency/article/00 0599.htm1 3-86702004 000200011&script=sci_arttext&tlng=enh ealth.xq23.com/conditions/part_1/Actin omycosis.html
9 /v12.n02 /1202.10/art-1202.10.htm
_ adam.cgi /encyclopedia/ency/article/000074trt.htm
x .htm ). I have no affiliation with any of these companies.
:-(
1 7.htm
http://www.merck.com/mrkshared/mmanu
Other links:
http://www.merck.com/mrkshared/mmanual/se
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/medlin
http://www.scielo.br/scielo.php?pid=S14
http://www.
This link is tricky, you may have to hit "stop loading" quickly, because the page is redirected to the current issue:
http://www.familypractice.com/journal/199
You probably don't understand Portuguese, but...
http://www.connectmed.com.br/cgi-bin/view
Also, I've seen a page (not shown here) talking about cancer induced by radiation treatment of actinomycosis lesions. Beware!
Your chances are good, I think. But avoid things that weaken your immune system, like sleeping too little. Also, this is a fungus, so try to get some solar radiation and fresh air.
Are you a smoker? I seem to have seen a description of pulmonary case in a smoker patient.
Another hint: there are some devices called "air purifiers" which kill fungus. A known brand over here is Sterilair (see, e.g., http://www.marcoware.com.br/sterilair/ingles/inde
You surely should have an equivalent product where you live. But, this may be useless, as it works by heating air, therefore killing spores -- which are NOT produced by actinomyces...
Anyway it may have some air drying effect, which I suppose would slow fungus development.
Also, try to think out of the box: what would you do to strenghten your immune response, particularly against a fungus? Does it have a non-pathogenic enemy you could use? Does it die with extreme low temperatures? Or extremely high (you could inhalate hot air with medication)?
Alternatively, and I have no idea if this works, you could breath special treated air only for some time -- artificially mixed or natural, like in this Poland mine: http://www.kopalnia-wieliczka.pl/english/trasa_t/
Sorry if I am shooting in the dark, but maybe some Polish friend knows something about this...
Good luck! And God bless you for all you've done.
I've had a friend who had gone to 2 well respected doctors with an illness. They then sent him to 2 liver experts. After perscribing him drugs that perspire in the cold. Quitting his job after suffering this illness for 6 months to be elegible for a govt subsidy on the drugs, a 3rd doctor sucessfully diagnosed his illness.
He had diabetes.
Please dont be so close minded.
Many years ago, I had a mysterious infection that knocked me flat. I would periodically develop a fever of 104-105 degrees (fahrenheit). After a few hours, this would subside and, apart from feeling extremely weak, I would be fine for a few days. It was not malaria. The original doctor I saw ran all kinds of tests, but was clearly out of his depth with my problem.
Fortunately, I was living in Bangkok Thailand where it is easy to find specialists in most medical disciplines cheaply and at short notice. I ended up seeing Dr Mattana Hanvanich (a fellow of John Hopkins) at the Bamrungrad Hospital. She is an outstanding doctor. The key, though, is that she had time to thoroughly investigate the problem.
One method she used might well be appropriate in your case. She asked me to keep a detailed diary of everything related to my condition. She asked me to record my temperature every two hours, note everything I ate, record when I slept, any symptoms. She read all that in conjunction with all the test results and eventually figured it out. The point though is that a single ten minute appointment by the best doctor in the world will probably not be sufficient if your case is unusual.
Whatever it costs, find a top specialist who can devote enough time to your case. If insurance will not cover it, maybe you should consider a flight to Bangkok. Dr Mattana's fees are ridiculously cheap by US standards (probably less than 10%). The Bumrungrad Hospital has an international reputation -- you can check them out on the Internet. If necessary, hospitalisation here will not break you financially either.
You manage to spell 'tonsillolith' correctly, but you misspell the following words:
throaght (throat)
throughally (thoroughly)
posibility (possibility)
paitent (patient)
nasel (nasal)
surgen (surgeon)
specilist (specialist)
Are you sure they didn't remove some grey matter as they fixed your tonsils? Damn...
Karma: Excellent Birds (mostly as a result of listening to Laurie Anderson)
Correct, Herb Pharm, http://www.herb-pharm.com/ has several products available to combat yeast-related syndromes. Kyo-Dophilus, http://www.kyolic.com/ may also help to restore your natural bacterial flora balance. I've undertaken my own research, and need to work on further documentation, since having an (elected) tonsillectomy 17 yrs ago due to continual ent infections which had reached the point of inflamed tonsils secreting smelly lumps. After the surgery I experienced immediate improvement. Contact your MD to see if this may be a viable option, in addition to following his advice, and see if they know of a good naturopathic practioner that you can both work with. Sometimes taking our health into our own hands is what is finally needed to find the proper road to a cure. Blessings & prayers for your improved health!
Treatment. He said treatment. That's like a program, not a substance. As in, something that is normally administered by a qualified physician. He said "high-dose antibiotic treatment" because at this point in time according to what little information he has about this disease he believes that is the one and only treatment that will actually help him. He isn't an idiot, so I am willing to bet that if he were to actually see a specialist and the specialist prescribed a different treatment, he would listen. But he hasn't seen a specialist yet, and as of the writing of the letter he won't have access to one until Friday.
I don't know if you're usually an idiot, but today you are being both an idiot and an ignorant, insensitive jackass.
BTW, antibiotics have no similarity to narcotics, hallucinogens or pain killers. They don't give you a "high" or anything like that. This makes your assertion doubly ridiculous. Next time you feel like "cutting to the chase", do yourself and all of us a favor. Don't.
I hope this guy gets better, but his blog revealed just a little too much personal information (weight and brushing habits). The guys father is a dentist or something, so there's no reason for him to ignore his health for this long.
Panic attacks and stress will and can cause all the other symptoms he described. I know. I had all of them. I had many doctors look me over as well. I had the "popping" feeling inside my chest and went to the ER room many times only to find out it was nothing. I've had my head feel like it was "popping" or I was having an annurism only to find out it was nothing. I've gone into cold shocks of shivering while sweating non-stop. I've been barely able to breathe and felt like I was about to die. In the end, I was prescribed Xanax and was told to take half a tab whenever any of these symtoms appeared. What it did was chill me out, because when your mind it racing, it makes you feel things that you wont normally feel, and then it only feeds into itself the more you think about it... Xanax basically makes you stoned and mellows you out .. It basically opened up my eyes that everything I was feeling was in my head. A few months later I stopped taking the Xanax and whenever I felt like my chest was "popping" or if my limbs went numbs, I'd just tell myself it wasn't real and it went away.
Unfortnately, people who have panic attacks can't often be cured this easily. Many of them REFUSE to believe it is just in their head because those feelings are just SO REAL.
He has probably been told this same thing many times but refuses to believe it. The tone on some of his doctors sounded less than respectful. I am going to guess this was why.
Amoxicillin 500mg 3 times a day has me in a holding pattern
This is a recipe for disaster. If Volkerding is only taking enough antibiotic to keep in a "holding pattern," but not eradicate the infection, amoxicillin will quickly become useless. He'd be better off taking a cocktail, or even rotating antibiotics (IANAMD).
It stayed in my jaw and lungs though.
The worst part was at one point it had swollen up so bad it killed a tooth, it popped and some yellowish-white paste came out of the side of my mouth.
It smelled worse then it tasted, which was.. well not nice.
This happened three or four times. I never went to see a doctor for it.
I also found, twice, what I thought of as being a calcium deposit in the back of my through. The skin around it was very red and irritated - and it made me cough. At times I would cough up what I could only equate to being really old cottage cheese - it was the right consistency and smelled like rotting milk.
This went on for quite a while, and got pretty bad at one point.
Eventually, largely because of the cottage cheese coming out of my lungs, I presumed it was being caused by my smoking habbit.
So, I switched to Newports because they 'felt good' when smoking them. Not I felt good, but the smoke felt good on my through and in my lungs. I spent the next month or so coughing out tons of crap, but I kept smoking them as I figured it must be clearing it out.
Obviously my problem was minor in comparison, though.
Having the popping sensation under armpits sounds like it's in his lymph nodes as well.
I certainly know this, if it comes back I'll treat it more seriously next time. I guess I never really thought about how long "I" had my problems - but it went on for atlesat a year before I even gave real notice to it. I equated the issue with a recent move and assumed it to be allergies, though, moreso I just really didn't care.
Having read this, next time I'll care a lot more.
That it would.
I hope somebody from Google is reading this thread. Not only would that be a marketing coup, but it would further give them a chance to prove that they're "not evil", as they like to claim.
Heh. I see I got moderated as a troll... I guess pointing out that self medicating for 3 years is a bad idea, and that the key to his illness was found on Google constitutes a troll... Whatever.
There's so little difference between politics and jihad lately...
Doctor: Uh, this is Doctor Brody at the Mayo Clinic. There's a passenger on your Chicago flight 209er, a little girl named Lisa Davis, en route to Minneapolis. She's scheduled for a heart transplant, we'd like you to tell her mother we found a donor an hour ago. We have the heart here, ready for surgery. . . We must have the recipient on the operating table within 6 hours. I want you to make sure she's kept in a reclined position and that a continuous watch is kept on her IV. Also, its very important that she remain calm. . .
Operator: EXCUSE ME, This is the operator Captain Oever, I have an emergency call on line 5 from a Mr. Hamm.
Oever: Alright, Give me Hamm on 5, hold the Mayo.
Old people fall. Young people spring. Rich people summer and winter.
With that out of the way... you really can't say he did the wrong thing in seeing different doctors, etc. He DID do what they told him to do, and he failed to get better (temporarily feeling better is akin to a "quick hack" in programming). And the thing is, the medical world just works that way. The good doctors spend a lot of time keeping up with the latest medical journals.
I guess I shouldn't mention the doctors that cancelled my appointment, only to run into them at the driving range or golf course...
I'm not a doctor and I don't know anyone who could help. What I can do is add you to my prayers and to our prayer chain. We'll pray for your health, your recovery, your comfort, and for your many doctors wisdom, guidance, and team work. I owe the career I have today to your production of Slackware, started learning it back at kernel 0.99pl13.
:)
Something you've not mentioned, is the health care costs. You did state you aren't looking for donations, but let me say this... If you end up using up your insurance or don't have any, tell us. We can not only find people who can help with your condition, but we can also find people (like myself) who are willing to help finance your recovery. Just say the word and let the fund raising begin.
God bless, Pat.
*Brandon Darbro
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It's common in western states.
It affects the lungs.
It causes decreased oxygen in the blood (which may explain the elevation problems)
It would seem likely that the first doctors in CA would have diagnosed it if it was indeed hantavirus. So maybe I'm off base. It's easy to map a number of diseases into common symptoms, especially if a common symptom is that you just feel bad.
I believe tonsils are part of your immune system. If they get infected it means something else is wrong.
Not sure if it's a good idea for everyone with recurring tonsil problems to have bits of their immune system removed.
In your case they're probably so screwed up that the docs think removing them would be better than leaving them in.
Still, I'd get a 2nd and 3rd opinion before I'd let docs chop parts out of my body.
Wonder if there's a course of antibiotics you can go through to clear whatever it is that's taken hold in your tonsils.
I personally think the docs ripping out tonsils are missing something - just like the h.pylori + stomach ulcer thing.
It's free. Or rather, the research has already been paid for by private and federal grants and your taxes. Medline contains many tens of thousands of medical research articles and citations to tens of millions if you have access to paper journals. These articles can be found using keywords for greater precision searches, something Google, Altavista, and Co cannot offer.
Beta is broken and the link to classic doesn't work. Stop wasting our time or there won't be anybody left here.
Whatever it is I hope they figure out ASAP what it is though.
He seems like a smart guy with no reason to lie.
Those popping and draining sounds were caused by something. People just don't make that kind of stuff up.
All I am saying is that you might want to reconsider an opinion like that without some more data and direct observation...
Wouldn't it be horrible to have someone die from a statement like yours? My mother in law died from heart failure. Doctors dismissed her symptoms. (Yes, several of them over the period of about a year, leading up to the final straw.) She got up, started doing her paper route. Felt pains, thought it was heartburn. Destroyed all but 15 percent of her potential heart function.
Had the doctors erred on the side of caution, she would have done things differently.
Something to think about, that's all.
Blogging because I can...
Pat isn't the only one involved in putting together Slackware. Why don't you get a clue you dumb fuck before you post nasty comments about someone who's probably done more for linux than anyone except Linus and Alan Cox.
If I'm using a proprietary OS and the Terrorists (tm) nuke Redmond, I'm screwed. If I'm using an Open Source OS and the sole maintainer gets sick, I have quite a few options. I can keep up with security updates myself. I can compile from source (many Slack users do that anyway). I can switch to another distro or even to a BSD, with far more ease than I could switch from non-free OS's.
Chances are, anyone who would put Slackware on a mission-critical server is quite capable of maintaining it himself while Pat is recovering.
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
it is purely and simply a BUSINESS. That is what it has become. Living and dying now means you MUST interface with the MEDICAL INDUSTRY.
Treat it as such and you may find reasonable care or assistance.
No physician actually HEALS. The body does that if presented with the correct assistance. The physician of today fails miserably in the ART of medicine but suceeds very very well in the BUSINESS of medicine.
It is probably the most profitable and well heeled of any business extant in the USA today. Merely take a look at their palatial estates and investments to ascertain some of the above.
The whole story looks like a classic example of improper diagnosis and treatement that is an excellent way to breed "superbugs". :(
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
I think we should start an effort to make Patrick the largest batch of chicken soup ever. It is amazing stuff, you know...
Seriously... Patrick, you rock. Slackware is one of the most amazing things I have ever seen.
Hope you feel better,
Tom
Tired of free iPod sigs? Subscribe to my blacklist
Go read the fscking story, its all there.
Otherwise STFU until you can say something usefull.
Cheers, Gene
..and get well soon! No rush of course! =) As a loyal Slacker, I must thank you for the many years of a solid distro. \m/
Fascism should more properly be called corporatism because it is the merger of state and corporate power. -- Mussolini
Yes I know the difference between the different forms, just happened to make a typo when deleting a large part of my comment and left the wrong "there". It's funny to see the grammar/spelling police get all excited.
Hey I've been a scientist type geek my whole life - grammar has never been my forte, and no they don't teach it in med. school. I typically leave the proofreading up my wife and openoffice in my research papers.
..........FULL STOP.
Hi
I know almost nothing about computers and was told about this website by his wife. Pat is one of my best friends and has been for many many years. I am posting this to let everyone know Pat is currently at the Mayo clinic and is undergoing a full battery of testing. At this point we (his friends and family) dont know anything more than that the doctors have admitted him, run many many tests, and he has an appointment to go over what they have found tomorrow the 19th.I wish I had more to tell you but at this time I don't. I am sure if he gets told hes going to be ok (even if after a long long treatment period) he will soon be posting to let everyone know the good news. If things go the other way(I am not a very religious person, but I am praying for Pat daily) I will try to post the occasional update on his condition for those who are interested.
- His Friend Guy.
using anonymous cause after this situation is over I will probably never post to this again so I've declined to create an account.
Oh, just a few thoughts of mine - for those of you who have tried to post some helpful advice I personally thank you and apreciate your efforts. Its nice to see so many people do what they can to help out a person in need. Thanks again.
-to those of you who have only posted critisisms about what he did before going to the doctor....thanks, your posts helped tons.-sarcasm if you hadnt guessed...freakin losers. Why don't you find something to do other than critisize someone asking for your help, what good does that do?
Feel free to flame me as I am not very computer literate and realy don't care. I just care about my friend and his health.
I am a user of Slackware and I have paid for the 4-CD set of Slackware 10.0 although I could download it - it is a very good distro and I reccomend it for *nix veterans and servers. I paid for it because I wanted to support the project and thank Patrick for this great software. Now I learn that Patrick is ill and I feel too nervous. If I was a doctor I would be willing to treat him for free but unfortunately I am just a Computer Science student. I am sure that the libre software community appreciates Slackware and, together with me, we all wish the best for Patrick.
This one even has a reference to Slack.
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