A personal story shared by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Nauman's own words are paraphrased here.
Nauman knew something was wrong. He had a sharp pain in his chest and struggled to breathe. At the emergency room a chest x-ray led his doctors to suspect pneumonia, but over the next few months the pain got worse. Then came night sweats, weight loss, extreme fatigue and diarrhea, until every breath was a struggle. A lung biopsy showed he had active tuberculosis (TB) disease.
TB Personal Stories: Nauman. CDC.
At first he was not worried. From what he vaguely remembered, he thought TB was a kind of cough that a week or two of medicine would clear up.
A harder road
He was referred to a local clinic that knew TB and began standard treatment. Within a couple of weeks he felt better and started gaining weight, but then he sensed his progress stalling. Tests showed his TB was drug-resistant: the medicines he was taking could not kill all the bacteria in his body.
Drug-resistant TB requires special medicines, treatment can take a long time, and the drugs can have side effects. For Nauman, one of them was given by injection. What worried him most, he recalled, was the length of treatment, which went from the six to nine months he had expected to 18 to 24 months.
The medicines left him tired through the day and gave him acid reflux. The psychological toll was heavy too: depression, fear, paranoia and constant worry. Balancing treatment with the rest of his life was often hard.
Directly observed therapy
For six months, Nauman went to the clinic every day for directly observed therapy (DOT), taking his medicine while a nurse watched; the nurse also gave him his injections. Once he had finished the injectable drug, he could continue DOT by video conference with his nurse. That made a big difference, he said: he could take his medicine whenever suited him, at work or at home.
Coming out the other side
After 20 months, Nauman finished treatment. He remembers it as a hard time but says it made him much stronger, and working in the TB community as an advocate, helping others, has made his life more fulfilling. He is part of We Are TB, a network of TB survivors.
His advice to people with TB is to find a support group, online or in person. Meeting other patients helped him learn about the disease, share experiences and know what to expect from treatment. And he wants people in treatment to know it gets better. He describes his life now as a complete turnaround from his time in treatment: physically healthier, mentally clear and focused, happy and optimistic, and back to his old self, maybe even better.
Sources
- Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Nauman's Story" (TB Personal Stories). https://www.cdc.gov/tb/stories/nauman.html
- CDC, "Drug-Resistant TB": https://www.cdc.gov/tb/about/drug-resistant.html; "Treatment for Active TB Disease": https://www.cdc.gov/tb/treatment/active-tuberculosis-disease.html; We Are TB: https://www.wearetb.com/
- Words on this page from people and organisations outside the federal government are paraphrased; rewritten in hubnx's own words.
- The film is the agency's own low-resolution copy, recovered from the Internet Archive's record of cdc.gov.
Licence: CC0 1.0 (public domain) · Adapted from www.cdc.gov
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