Care should be available.

This is not about weather it is possible to save one's own life, but weather one should HAVE TO.

My Doctor in Michigan initally thought it was a virus, and did not prescribe antibotics.
For three months I got steadily worse with superblocked, smelly, sticky green stuff from my sinuses when I could get anything at all out of them.

In January I went to the ENTs at the University of Oklahoma, because I was working in Ok a that time, and they did cultures and gave me floroquinilone, a cortizone packet and cortizone spray.

I took everything as directed and got better for a day or two, and then progressively worse while taking the antibotic and cortizone.

When I went back for my next appointment, 30 days after the 1st, I was told that all the cultures had come back negative, that it was an allergy, and I needed to have a MRI of my sinuses and sinus surgery immediately. An MRI costs 1500.00 and the surgery would be about 10,000.

During that month, since I was getting worse, i had made slides and examined the effulvia from my nose under a microscope and had seen tangles of filaments like glass noodles. I had expected to have an antifungal drug proscribed but that did not happen.
They were supprised when I walked out rather than checking in but I had just changed jobs and become a consultant, and the new insurance company had refuse to cover anything to do with my sinusis, so if I went into the hospital I would have to pay for it out of pocket. The other thing was that I did not have any confidence that they could control the infection after surgery if they could not detect it to begin with.

It did not make sense.

So here I am, running a fever of 102 despite the antibotic, chilling, with blocked burning sinuses, a stiff neck and double vision, and the beginings of delirium, alone and far from home, and I can't even go to the emergency room, because if the main hospital's lab did not find anything in a month there was very little chance the result would be any different in the ER. So it was up to me. I made a swab out of a loop of florest wire and swabbed out my sinuses with rose fungicide. A green rubbery mass the size of my thumb fell out about 8 hours later, and I lost my voice for three weeks. But I could breath!

Later I had another fungal culture done whih was positive and one that I was told was negative, but turned out to have been sent to the CDC bacause the hospital lab could not identify the fungus. So if you DO have one of the rouge fungi in you nose, the likelyhood of speedy identification and treatment is nil.

No one should have to be in this situation.
I should not have my tax dollars spent to train doctors to tell me that if I have what it looks like I have I would be dead, therefore I don't have it. DUH!!!

The viscosity of mucus can be measured.
Mucolytic agents can be prescribed. But until the treatment guidelines are changed the public will not be effectively treated.

When a girl in the hospital lab where I live now fell ill with blocked sinuses a mucolytic agent Mucomist was prescribed for her along with Biaxin. That is not the treatment that they offered me, so there may be not a complete lack of knowledge but a double standard, or it could be that her doctor was Kevin, who cares intensly about cureing people and sod all about treatment guidelines. But this gets him into trouble, with the more conservative specialests who don't cure, and it should not.
This is why the treatment guidelines for the specialests need to change. Tweet