Life Can Change Real Fast When Pneumonia Strikes Close to Home
My mom is an incredible person. She’s sixty-nine years old, but you would never know it. She still works as an office manager. She has a very active social life. She’s a part-time university student studying for a Bachelor’s in psychology. She recently finished serving her fourth term as a municipal councilperson. And she lives on her own in a second storey walk-up in rural Ontario. When you see a dynamo like Pat McCourt going about her day, sixty-nine doesn’t seem that old at all. It is, after all, just a number.
But, let me tell you, when I got a text message from my mom saying, “I’ve been admitted to the hospital with pneumonia,” three things went through my mind really fast. The first was that, as much as I love Montreal and feel so fortunate to have called it my home these last ten years, 440 kilometers is a hell of a long way when someone you love falls ill. My second thought was, how the hell did this happen so fast? Like most people, I don’t call my mom as often as I should, but still ... I hadn’t even known she was sick.
“At first I just had a little cough, and it was a little harder for me to breathe,” my mom explained to me. “I still went in to work, but I only stayed for half a day because I didn’t feel quite right. The next day, I booked a virtual appointment with a doctor, and he referred me for a chest x-ray because he thought it was possible I had pneumonia. I wasn’t particularly bothered about it though. I’ve had pneumonia twice before, once in my thirties and once in my early sixties. I figured I’d be off work for a couple of days, maybe a week, and that would be it. I wasn’t worried.”
That brings us to the third thought that occurred to me. Because my mom is so active and engaged and vibrant, I often think of her as being much younger than she is. But, as a health writer who spends a whole lot of time reading medical studies and talking to health care professionals, I also know that age isn’t always just a number. Healthy at sixty-nine can be very, very healthy. But sick at sixty-nine is another matter entirely.
My mom went and got the chest X-ray, which didn’t show anything concerning, and she was sent home with antibiotics and a prescription for bed rest. So far, this experience tracked well with her previous bouts of pneumonia. It seemed par for the course. But, as we age, our immune systems get weaker. The course gets rougher. Pneumonia is always serious, but the American Lung Association identifies several high-risk groups for which pneumonia can quickly become a life-threatening condition: people who are immunocompromised, children two years of age and younger, and adults over the age of sixty-five.
The morning after her chest X-ray, her breathing was so laboured that she could hardly get out of bed. The stairs down out of her apartment were an impossibility. She called an ambulance. When Pat arrived at the regional hospital, they found her oxygen levels were concerningly low, especially when she tried to walk. She was admitted and put on supplemental oxygen. A lung CT scan finally confirmed the pneumonia diagnosis. And that’s when my mom got around to texting me. It had been less than 48 hours since she first noticed she had a bit of a cough.
The doctors told her she’d be in the hospital for just a night or two—until her oxygen levels stabilized. She ended up hospitalized for twelve days.
“The first few days are a jumble,” she says. “They just kept increasing my oxygen. Every time I saw a new nurse, they would ask me how much oxygen I was usually on at home. I kept having to tell them, no, this is not what I’m like. There was a clear mismatch between the person they were seeing in that hospital bed and the person I see when I look at myself. The worst part was that I then started picturing myself as that person. We’ve all known older people who need to bring oxygen tanks with them everywhere. The grandma who just sits in one chair the whole time at the family gatherings because moving around is too hard for her. I’ve got seven grandkids, but I’m not ready to be that grandma yet.”
The reality for an older adult though, even a healthy and active one, is that each serious illness makes that transition to lowered capability—to being “old”—more likely. The older a person gets, the harder it is for them to bounce back from being sick, and especially from being hospitalized.
Doctor Francesco Gesualdo, a researcher at Bambino Gesù Children’s Hospital in Italy explains the reasons for this, “For older adults, it is often more difficult to recover from pneumonia because their immune system is weaker than that of younger individuals; their lung function declines with age, and they are often affected by health conditions that limit the immune system's ability to clear infections.” Dr. Gesualdo continues, “In people over 65, hospitalization due to pneumonia can have long-term impacts, including decreased mobility, memory decline, and a higher chance of being hospitalized again.”
It has been seven weeks since my mom first got sick, and she’s just now returning to work half-time. She’s confident that she’s going to make a full recovery, but the slow and difficult nature of that recovery has definitely left her shaken.
“I still tire so quickly,” she says. “I’ve spent so much time just sitting over the last weeks that I’m starting to go a little stir crazy. And, what’s worse, my brain wasn’t working right for much of it. I couldn’t focus. I couldn’t read or do any of my coursework. I basically missed the first half of the school year just because of this illness. Even now, just talking on the phone, I can feel my chest getting heavier the longer I talk. My breathing is still not like it was before the pneumonia. It’s a little scary. If my life were to stay like it’s been this last month and a half, I’d be pretty depressed. There’s so much I want to do that I can’t do if I’m not well.”
Because it is so hard to recover from illnesses like these, preventing them in the first place is one of the best things a person can do to safeguard their health and independence as they age. The single most common cause of pneumonia is the bacteria known as Streptococcus pneumoniae. Importantly, it’s vaccine preventable. In fact, many refer to the vaccine simply as “the pneumonia vaccine” even though this bacteria can also cause other conditions like meningitis and sepsis.
“Pneumonia is an infection of the lungs that can be caused by different types of microorganisms—viruses, bacteria, and fungi,” says Dr. Gesualdo. “One of the most serious bacterial pneumonias is caused by Streptococcus pneumoniae. Safe and effective vaccines are available to prevent pneumococcal pneumonia, and they are recommended for infants, elderly people, individuals with certain underlying conditions and those with a weakened immune system. Pneumococcal vaccines are a mainstay for pneumonia prevention; nevertheless, a fully immunised person can still develop pneumonia. First, because microorganisms other than pneumococcus can cause pneumonia, and, second, because vaccines against respiratory infections are working as expected when they reduce disease severity and complications.”
The original cause of my mom’s pneumonia was never conclusively determined, and she had indeed received that pneumococcus vaccine, but this illness has not lessened her faith in the power of immunization. The data, after all, is clear. Yes, you can be fully immunized and still get sick, but, statistically, you’ll get sick much less often or be less severely ill. And, in the face of a difficult recovery from pneumonia, it’s abundantly clear that getting sick less often or less severely is absolutely critical for someone with plans as big as my mom’s.
“I can acknowledge that I’m getting older,” she says. “I don’t feel old, but, yes, my body isn’t as young as it used to be. But I love the life I have. It’s so fulfilling, and I want to keep living it. I know my age will catch up to me one day. We’re all going to hit a wall eventually. But I want to hit it going eighty, not forty. I want to go splat.”