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Getting Tuberculosis

You'd think by now I'd know how to spell Tuberculosis without having to look it up.

For me, having TB was honestly more funny than scary. I would get about 1 of 3 responses:

> Isn't that a disease from the 1800s?

Yes, apparently it's still around. Who knew?

If I'm talking to a doctor, it's:

> What?! You're messing with me. You got TB? Can I ask you something, did you spend time in a federal prison recently? If not, how about in a developing nation?

And then there's some people who just respond:

> Oh, interesting.

I think that last group doesn't know what tuberculosis is, how deadly it is, and how rare it is (in the US). Honestly, I was in that group prior.

How I got TB

It's all my wife's fault. In fact, when I say I had TB, that's kind of an overstatement.

It's important to know, in case (like me) you didn't, there are 2 types of TB. Actually, WebMD is telling me there's 4, but there's basically 2:

1. Latent TB 2. Active TB

I really had Latent TB, which is much less exciting. Tuberculosis is a weird infection, primarily living in your lungs (it's _really_ bad if it's outside your lungs). Once you contract it, it can sit there for a while. I mean years, decades even.

Latent TB doesn't really do anything, it just sits there until it decides it's time to wake up, try to kill you, and try to kill everyone around you. Overall though, a harmless little fellow at this stage. You can't even spread latent TB (this was really hard to convince people was true right after the Pandemic). TB is spread through the air. In fact, I was told by our doctor that you can't contract it by drinking after someone with TB, which is counterintuitive.

Since Latent TB by definition is asymptomatic and hasn't fully developed in your lungs it's non-contagious. So basically I was good. My lungs were a timebomb, but other than that I was good.

My wife, on the other hand, had Active TB. Come to think of it, that's probably how I got TB.

How my wife got TB

We have no idea.

It's kind of wild. When you're diagnosed with TB, at least in Texas, they go track down everyone you've been in an enclosed space with for more than half an hour over the past 4-6 months and test them for TB. We were well on our way of coming out of COVID when we got the diagnosis, so there were a lot of phone calls to make. My sister-in-law (my wife's sister) was also living with us at the time.

The good news is that no one else contracted it! Even my sister-in-law avoided it (lucky). The testing wasn't too bad, I think just 2 blood draws about a month apart. For our nieces and nephews, it was a lot worse, and I still feel bad about this even though logically I know there was no way we could have known we had TB or were endangering them. Basically, they had to take antibiotics as if they had Latent TB and get a blood draw once a month for something like 3 or 4 months.

That's a lot for a little kid, and they didn't even have TB. The US government is extremely cautious about TB and kids, because if it's contracted, it's basically a death sentence. So even though they didn't have it, they treated them like they did just to make 100% sure they were safe.

The tracking only went one way. We didn't do any official sleuthing backwards to discover who gave it to us. The main reason is the whole TB-can-live-in-your-body-for-years thing. It's just an exercise in futility, and it kind of doesn't even matter. The best thing to do is to treat everyone who has TB and do your best to stop the spread from that one person. This strategy works really well for TB actually. It's a strategy that was tried (to varying degrees of strictness) with COVID-19, but didn't seem to work quite so well unfortunately.

So yeah, who knows, _maybe_ somehow she got it in college? But we really don't know, and she was never in any suspect countries.

How we got the Diagnosis

Once we knew everyone else was safe (except me), we were slightly relieved. We were also relieved in another, kind of odd way. This diagnosis was an answer to a 2 year journey.

I think the first time I remember my wife coughing unexpectedly, we'd just moved into our new house. This would have been April 2020 (great time to buy a house by the way, but didn't feel like it at the time). Coughing while there's a deadly virus going around is a little scary, but time revealed that's definitely not what she had. But she kept coughing, and it became harder for her to get a deep breath.

A correction from my wife:

> I actually started experiencing tightness in the right side of my chest/difficulty getting a deep and satisfying breath BEFORE the coughing started. But I give you creative license.

I'm gonna be honest, it was pretty annoying. I mean coughing is annoying, even though logically I know the other person can't do anything about it. I got a lot of opportunities to practice patience and to learn how to believe my wife about symptoms I couldn't see (like shortness of breath). Okay enough about me and my flaws, my impatience is something I can write about some other time.

So for about 2 years my wife was trying to figure out

I won't go through all the details of every doctor, but let's just say this did not strengthen my wife's trust in the US medical system. Again, another good topic for another time, because we definitely saw some ways it's broken, but in each doctor's defense: women in their mid-twenties in the US who are perfectly healthy otherwise, never been to developing countries, and never been to prison do not get TB very often.

It was basically diagnosed as asthma. It was diagnosed as asthma for way too long honestly. She kept trying different, higher-strength (not to mention, more expensive) inhalers, and they did absolutely nothing. Her symptoms slowly, but progressively, got worse.

So finally they stuck a tube down her throat (that was scary) and found out she had TB. We could have found that out with a blood test, but what's done is done. So now we have this terrifying information about this disease we know nothing about, we're told to quarantine, and we're directed to the state of Texas's TB clinic (didn't know that was a thing). Oh, and at the same time the Bronchoscopy stirred up her TB and made her incredibly sick for a week, the kind of sickness that would have previously made the doctors think "hm, maybe you have TB, we should do a blood test".

My poor wife, she's a champ. Sorry for being annoyed at your coughing if you read this, I'm really proud of you.

TB Treatment

So how does one treat TB?

Easy:

Apparently it's basically illegal to have TB in Texas.

This lasts about a month, and I'm not kidding, someone came to our house every day to watch us do this.

It was a little different for me. I still had to go to the clinic every month, avoid alcohol, and take my drugs in front of this person, but I got to take less pills and because I wasn't symptomatic I could go around people. I quarantined with my wife during this time though, for solidarity because it kind of sucked.

People were so sweet to us during this time though. My company bought us groceries, so many people brought us meals, we got plenty of well wishes. We felt really loved by our community.

Eventually you graduate from the person coming to your house and instead you get to film yourself taking your pills every day on a terrible app. You also graduate from all the pills and take a few less, and they switch them up at some point. Certain antibiotics are good at the beginning, but TB gets used to them, so you have to trick it with new ones. There was also a shortage of one drug so we switched to another. This is one disease we _really_ know how to treat.

Finally, you have to do this for 9 months. I think I did it for 4, but the wife (again, a complete trooper) did it for 9. They want to make sure the TB is dead. Apparently it used to be a shorter amount of time, but then they found out the TB would sometimes come back, and it'd be drug-resistant, which I think is as bad as it sounds.

What getting tuberculosis gave us

Have I mentioned that I'm proud of my wife? I'm so proud of her. This was awful, more so the unknown piece of it, but the treatment wasn't necessarily "fun". Again, we felt a lot of love from our community, and both of our workplaces were very understanding and supportive of whatever we needed during the time.

It was also really good to take a break from alcohol. Neither of us have an addiction to alcohol, but I have some family history that makes me pretty aware of how devastating it can be in a person's life. Alcohol is yet another topic I should probably write about, but the main benefit I saw from not drinking was new found energy, especially in the mornings. We both now avoid drinking during the week except for social settings like meetups and company happy hours, and save that for the weekends (still me much more than my wife).

We also got really into the non-alcoholic (NA) that's really big right now. I love making mixed drinks, so it was fun to learn how to make some zero-alcohol fruity drinks (basically just fancy juice). We also tried a ton of NA beers, and many of them range from very bad to okay. Once NA brewery did rise above the others: Athletic. We still regularly buy Athletic, and especially like trying all their seasonal and experimental flavors. My wife got so into it she decided to become an Athletic Ambassador. Her instagram is no longer just pictures of me and the dogs, but also of various Athletic cans.

My wife also lost weight during TB. We didn't really realize it, partly because she's already a petite woman, partly because we took up climbing, and partly because it was so gradual. She is now at a healthy weight, which we're both very grateful about, but in retrospect it was weird how we didn't realize this disease was affecting her negatively in this way too.

I'm incredibly grateful for all the doctors and researchers who have figured out how to beat this thing. I'm grateful I'm not from the 1800s, and don't have to say goodbye to my wife in my 20s because of this diagnosis. When we said our wedding vows we said "in sickness and in health". I'm not grateful we got TB, but I'm grateful I got to practice the "in sickness" part.

More than anything, getting tuberculosis gave me a bunch of random facts about tuberculosis and how to treat it.

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