Re: Pneumonia and No RLS

[Guest guest]

Hi Jack

I told you to get better. Enough with the chest problems, even though

they seem to be helping your RLS.:-) The answer to your question is

NO. Staying on prednisone, antibiotics and Albuterol, unless needed

for asthma or chronic lung disease, is a no-no. You would be setting

yourself up for all kinds of lung infections with exotic (bad, not

good) organisms that are tough to treat. I have noticed that

inflammatory conditions do strange things with RLS. When I had an

infected leg after bypass surgery, all of the RLS symptoms seemed to

concentrate in the area of inflammation. My RLS has always been

bilateral legs and later bilateral arms also. The arms and uninflamed

leg became asymptomatic, only to return to their previous state after

the infection in the leg cleared up. The only thing that I was taking

new was an antibiotic, but after stopping the antibiotic, nothing

changed until the inflammation cleared and the wound healed. Then I

slowly went back to my previous RLS pattern. The one leg was enough to

keep me awake with RLS while it was inflamed.

To extend the analogy, I don't know what RLS of the lung would feel

like. :-) About all you could do in response is to cough, have pain in

the chest and bring up gunk. That's what you do when you have

pneumonia. In short, there is so much we don't know about RLS, that

any phenomenon seems possible. With my leg, it seemed that all of the

RLS symptom complex was being directed to the area of tissue

destruction and inflammation possibly because of information being

sent to the spinal cord from that area. Who knows?

Dick