My wife is adamant about me going to the doctor if I have even a mild tingling down in the bronchial tubes. Anything lung related or close to bronchitis, I now go to the doctor to get treatment. It can go from mild coughing to bronchitis to pneumonia very quickly.
I waited one time too long and got very close to pneumonia. I don’t play around anymore.
I thought of Henson, too.
I’m not sure that “Toughing it out” is the right way to think about it. We all have occasional respiratory afflictions, and the vast majority of them never lead to anything serious, nor do they significantly impair us while they’re happening. But these things can occasionally progress from “Oh, it’s just a cold” to life-threatening very quickly.
I’m sure we’ve all heard about people who developed sepsis, and ended up having limbs (sometimes all four!) amputated, and they sometimes lose their kidneys and GI tract in extreme situations, and somehow “survive” this. Had this been Henson’s or Busch’s fate, this was the better alternative, awful as it is.
And sometimes seemingly healthy people get really sick and don’t recover, and we don’t know why except that it was Their Time. RIP, Kyle Busch.
I wonder if he was like Jim Henson, who was advised by people to go the doctor and didn’t. People think they can beat bad coughs and had Henson or maybe Busch gone to the doctor much earlier he would have made it.
A woman friend of mine got sepsis, suposedly from a female hygiene product, I do not know the intimate details. It caused her to also have a heart attack and die on the bathroom floor. Otherwise healthy 60 yr old woman. Beautilful. She and her husband were both vitamin believers, if you take enough vitamins you never need to go to the doctor. Would not go to see a doctor. They had plenty of money. Husband shot himself in the head a month later. Very, very sad.
For someone in a competitive sport, they get used to toughing things out. They can’t take time away from the sport to go to the doctor every time something hurts or they have the sniffles.They’d be spending all their days going to doctors. Many of the drivers have raced through illnesses like stomach bugs, diarrhea, colds, broken bones, bruises, etc. Even when their cooling suit fails or they run out of water, they keep racing till the end and suffer the effects of overheating and dehydration. I’d guess that Busch thought this was a cold just like many he’s had in the past and that he’d push through just fine just like he had many times before.
[As an aside, I find it disconcerting that so many major issues can have relatively minor symptoms that aren’t much different than those of minor issues. Is it a cold or pneumonia? Is it indigestion or a heart attack? Makes one think they have to go to the doctor for every issue no matter how minor.]
I mean, i don’t go to the doctor every time i have a cold. Do you? Does anyone?
I certainly don’t, and it’s not because I live in the USA.
Last month, I had a tummy bug (vomited 3 times in a couple of hours, something I had not done since I was a kid; the few times that’s happened to me as an adult, it was basically one and done) and it took 3 weeks before my appetite fully returned. Every day, I would think, “Maybe I’ll want a broader diet today” and it didn’t happen, and then one day, it did. I’m really liking food now, probably a bit too much.
Probably not anyone except those with suppressed immune systems, the elderly, and the hypochondriacal.
For a young, presumably very fit person, pneumonia (or other serious disease) isn’t likely to even come to mind when one is sick. They likely think they have a cold, flu (or maybe COVID), and think that it’s something which will just leave them feeling kind of punked for a few days.
As @filmore notes, when one adds in Busch being a highly competitive, top-tier athlete, in the middle of his season, one can imagine him ignoring or downplaying worsening symptoms, because of his focus on his job.
Sports fans may remember Michael Jordan’s “Flu Game,” in the 1997 NBA Finals, when he came down with either food poisoning or a stomach bug the night before Game 5. Jordan played anyway, despite spending the day in bed, and though he was clearly exhausted, he took over the fourth quarter, to seal the win for the Bulls.