Post-intensive care syndrome results from continuous inflammation

It's true, though, that for really severe inflammation disorders that doctors start prescribing systemic immunosuppressants, which then result in the patient getting real illnesses more often. Often the patient has such a bad condition at that point - my psoriasis leads to skin flaking off in bloody patches and smearing blood on the things I touch and my hands feeling like sand paper to other people, for example - that they prefer this overall.

Even the localized topical immunosuppressants like hydrocortisone cream have negative side effects like skin thinning, but I think everyone using those agrees it's better than the extra inflammation.

The only constant in all is an allergy and a cyst causing constant swelling and inflammation. The technical appearance of this, and lab results, never looks very bad, and doctors are quick to discard the cyst as a source of my problems.

I'm at the end of my wits, and my mind and body are deteriorating further and I find it hard to muster up the energy to try and resolve this with ever more visits to doctors. My physicians are not concerned enough to try and resolve this quickly, because I still appear fine. I can function normally for a while. But working 9-5 and having a life is honestly above my limit. I don't dare press the issue too much because doctors are quick to jump to psychological-issues-are-the-source (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Somatic_symptom_disorder) . Physician visits and different things are spaced so widely that a lot of times passes, and I'm still supposed to wait longer and go step-by-step.

After all this time, and a lot chasing ideas and trying out smaller remedies, I arrived at the conclusion/idea that it was the cyst and the inflammation and possibly recurrent colonisation with bacertia from it all along. The cyst that I was told was not an issue.

It's a miracle that I founded and still have a family. I appreciate all the good things I received and achieved, but honest to god large parts of the way were miserable, and I'm afraid to find out that it's not going to get better.

P.S.: Sorry for venting

Constantly told it was depression or anxiety.

Turned out it was an auto immune problem.

Anti depressants made me care less about problems but didn’t fix them.

Usually an ICU stay is the result of being profoundly and dangerously ill -- going to the ICU likely means that you need significant pharmacological and/or mechanical assistance in the basic things like... circulating blood. Or oxygenation. And once there, you may have tubes/catheters/wires in various orifices and puncturing vessels and organs. You're often medically sedated, and if you become too awake or agitated, you are sedated further. Unsurprisingly, many patients become agitated or delirious -- they don't know where they are or when it is or maybe even who they are. Which makes things worse. I mean, imagine it -- maybe you wake up in the midst of this horrendous state of affairs, and you become understandably upset and confused, but if you move around or holler (if you can) you may well get further sedated. Repeatedly. The cognitive impact of this alone can understandably be immense.

I don't mean to say that ICUs are some evil thing, though surely they could be improved. But the causes of "post-intensive care syndrome" are undoubtedly enormously multi-factorial, what with the level of derangement and insult to your body (and especially your mind!) from whatever illness led to you the ICU to begin with, and the experience of being there. And as such I am skeptical that this single protein could be terrifically useful either as a marker of or a therapeutic target for cognitive impairment in this setting.

(I think as protein mass spec and other technologies improve, we might gain a better understanding of how sets of dozens or hundreds of proteins in the body may be related to disease states, and perhaps therapies will target combinations of proteins or more complex interactions rather than "blocks this one protein".)

>Cognitive impairment has long been associated with inflammation in older adults: https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3390758/

Once upon a time, when I was an itty bitty grad student, I had an appointment with an immunology PI to ask to be involved in their research.

One of the first questions they asked me was, what's inflammation?

"You want the layman's answer or the real answer?"

"Both."

"The layman's answer is that set of cellular and biochemical reactions involved with infections and their resolution."

"And the real answer?"

"There's no such thing. 'Inflammation' is the set of cellular and molecular biology that immunologists discovered before everyone else did. There isn't a single molecule in the body that isn't involved in a wide variety of functions, and there isn't a single function -be it extracellular remodeling, monitoring of cells for expression of abnormal proteins, cell signaling, cell life cycle regulation, etc. - that doesn't hook into a hundred different functions in a hundred different contexts. 'Inflammation' refers to the lens of the person studying the thing, not the thing."

I got a happy smile and a welcome handshake with that answer.

"Inflammation" as an explanation in medicine ranks alongside "Quantum Physics" as an explanation in everything else. When someone starts citing "quantum physics" for why anything, you can safely tune them out 99.99% of the time.