I am still working my way through my immune response to an influenza shot and six days later, my Covid-19 booster.

I am kicking myself a bit for having them that close together, but at least my immune system responds. I think my immune system takes a shotgun approach and raises ALL the antibodies, and since I most probably have some antibodies that attack my own tissues, it’s not terribly much fun. I’ve had to put pulmonary rehab on hold until my fast twitch muscles work again. They aren’t working and my slow twitch muscles are very pissed off and stiff at having to do double duty. If I do aerobic things, my rib muscles hurt for two days. THAT feels awful.

The good thing (ha.) is that I am having the antibody response but I do not have pneumonia. The working theory is that I have PANS and antibodies to tubulin. Tubulin powers muscles, including lung cilia. Their job is to clean any trash out that gets breathed in. I am at much higher risk for getting pneumonia while the lung cilia are on auto-immune vacation. I am mostly staying home and masking when I go out. A friend got exposed to Covid-19 and refused to test at day five. Well, ok for him, but he could be asymptomatic. So he’s not allowed anywhere near me for at least another ten days. I disapprove of his callousness towards me and others.

Tobacco also paralyzes lung cilia. When I was working I would warn smokers that they might cough more when they stopped smoking, because the cilia would wake up and clean house. “Hey! No one has swept here in years!” A year after quitting smoking, the lung cancer risk drops almost to that of a non-smoker, because those cilia clean house. Isn’t THAT cool?

I don’t know how long my fast twitch muscles will be screwed up. With the last pneumonia, it was nearly a year before the antibodies finally went down. I woke one morning with my slow twitch muscles insanely stiff and my fast twitch back but weak as a newborn kitten. My slow twitch muscles were yelling at my fast twitch: “Where have you BEEN? We’ve been doing YOUR WORK!!” My fast twitch were confused, weak and surprised. I could barely walk down my stairs that day.

Even so, I am lucky. I have a version of chronic fatigue, but because only my fast twitch muscles are affected, I can still do stuff while sick. The people who can barely get out of bed, my working theory is that it is both the fast twitch and the slow twitch muscles that are affected.

And then there are the brain antibodies. Ugh. The silver lining is that the antibodies make me a bit OCD and a bit ADHD, so I am organizing the house. I vacuumed the stairs. That sounds trivial except that I HATE the vacuum. I usually use this peculiar cat hair sponge thing on the stairs, but this time I got the vacuum out. I think organizing and vacuuming are hella funny symptoms of autoantibodies.

Here is a blog post by another physician, also about brain antibodies and encephalopathy. Brain inflammation.

https://www.potomacpsychiatry.com/blog/infectious-diseases-and-psychiatric-illness

Great blog post. And the NIH paper on multiple studies of encephalopathy:

https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC6455066/

If I have the energy today, I may try to look up the trajectory of antibody rise and fall after immunization. My brain tells me somewhere between 6 weeks and 6 months, pulling old data from somewhere, but I took immunology classes when I was working at the National Institutes of Health (late 1980s) and in medical school (early 1990s), so there may be new information. Science changes. I am hoping for less than six months really, and meanwhile trying not to get pneumonia.

Blessings and peace you.

I took the photograph in 2021, while I was REALLY sick. Glow in the dark Zombies stealing the cat food. I have to entertain myself somehow when I have pneumonia.