Saw my regular Primary Care specialist yesterday and got a referral to the Infectious Disease specialist.
Will go have strep A antibody titer drawn today. Ok, the tooth thing is most likely anaerobic bacteria, says the endodontist. Yes AND when we get sick, all of the antibodies go up. Because the immune system says, holy cats, something is wrong, turn them all on. The strep antibodies make me irritated, anxious and feel like caffeine-on-steroids. I started penicillin on Sunday after talking to my dentist about the 2-3 cm lump on my right face. Ok-maybe-it-is-not-strep-A, but two days later on Tuesday, I felt so down and so glum that I just wanted to stop penicillin and give up. At least, part of me wanted that. The other part was driving the 40 minutes to the endodontist and agreeing to an emergency root canal and being a good patient. And then driving 40 minutes home.
When the antibodies go up I feel anxious and irritable and paranoid and awful. When they go down I cry and want to huddle with a teddy bear and want to give up.
I am wondering if I have immune system PTSD. Go ahead, laugh, but remember, my mother had tuberculosis during the whole pregnancy. Cornell University missed it on the xrays. She dropped out, married my father, got pregnant and was at the University of Tennessee. She coughed blood at 8 months pregnant and was sure she would die of lung cancer. It was not lung cancer, it was tuberculosis. She went in the Knoxville Tuberculosis Sanatorium. I was the first baby born there in 26 years, she said. She said the staff was crazy excited. She kissed me and I was whisked away to my father and my grandparents, and she did not hold me again for 9 months.
So mostly newborns with mothers with active tuberculosis die. Because they get tuberculosis. It is airborne. There are mysteries here. Why didn't my father get it? I think it's because he smoked unfiltered camels. Or possibly it was not really "active" until she was 8 months pregnant. It could have been "latent" -- not infectious, before that. Where did my mother get it? Well, my grandmother's sister, her aunt Esther, had tuberculosis and survived it too. Also, my mother spent the year after high school in Paris, 1959, in art school. Apparently there was still a lot of tuberculosis there.
Maybe my immune system got hyper-primed way back then. More and more we are realizing that there are effects on fetuses in the womb. Withdrawing from opiates or heroin in the womb is really really bad, and better to have people stable on methadone or buprenorphine and do a slow withdrawal for the newborn after delivery. Other effects, and gene changes that are passed from parent to child. Tuberculosis does not cross the placental barrier: but the antibodies and infection still have effects. The fetal and newborn immune system is immature and the fetus gets antibodies in the the mother's milk, if the infant is nursed. I, of course, wasn't.
It is all very interesting. My immune system early warning system when I am getting really sick is an off the scale freak out. I did not recognize it after my sister died, nor after my father died, but now I have had two more episodes, without sepsis. I am very very glad not to have a third round of sepsis. My mother said that when my sister and I would get sick, I always got sicker. Am I more vulnerable or is it a hyper vigilent immune system? In the 1917-1918 influenza, age 18-50 died more because the immune system reaction to the influenza overwhelmed them. Their lungs swelled shut, they turned blue from hypoxia, and fell over dead. In San Francisco, there are photographs of bodies stacked 5 deep in the hospital hallways. Because it hit so hard and fast....
Now, if I have immune system PTSD, do other people? Maybe not from tuberculosis, but from all sorts of things and god-knows-what. Babies born during wars, during plagues, when the family is living in terror of ebola. Perhaps that terror-paranoid-PTSD wiring is an evolutionary back up, primed for when a fetus is forming during the Black Death or pandemic influenza..... People like me might actually be useful in the right circumstances. And is the wiring passed down? My daughter did pack that labelled tsunami kit for college, lifestraw and all....
I will report back on the conversation with the infectious disease doc. I think the reply I will get is "Interesting." and "We don't know."
And maybe it all explains the preppers...