I'm out of hospital now (finally, almost 3 weeks in quarantine is pretty miserable.)

As mentioned somewhere here, I had radiation therapy for the thymoma that I had. Due to the location, this burned my chest, back, esophagus and lungs. It is a natural and expected side effect of radiation therapy to the upper chest. The problem is I caught a cold during therapy. The burnt lungs collapsed some bronchial tubes and the cold settled in those collapsed areas developing into pneumonia. Pneumonia is a very severe aggravator of MG and I was unable to get nutrition in to fight it off. While in hospital I picked up some MRSA in my lungs which resulted in my quarantine and extended stay. The infectious disease specialist wanted me to get it all out before letting me leave where I had come in with such severe pneumonia.

I have a great neuro, as soon as he saw me he knew what was going on and got the ball rolling to fixing my condition. I didn't even have to tell him anything about what was happening, he asked if I had a cold recently and then went on with various questions that he seemed to already know the answers to, I just needed to confirm. He setup plasmaphoresis right away and that resolved almost all of the MG issues. They just had to deal with the pneumonia and lung damage after that.

I'm on quite a pharmacy of drugs here right now... they upped my mestinon from 60mg x3 to 90. I'm on a short term run of prednisone for the lung damage and a heavy duty antibiotic for the MRSA.

Hi Erin,

My story has now been posted to my livejournal. It is public and the url is brennan068 . livejournal . com (without the spaces obviously). Feel free to glean whatever you think will help anybody else out of it. I've posted both a general "Myasthenia Gravis and me" which tells of my initial experience as well as a very long two part post of my recent crisis.

Cheers,

Brian.