My lungs quit without two weeks notice

At the end of April, my body decided it was time for an unplanned software update and I was introduced to pneumonia. Not the cinematic kind where someone looks softly ill in a dramatic way, but the real kind where you start questioning whether breathing has always been this complicated and everyone just agreed not to mention it.

What began as "I'm probably just tired" escalated into full-blown pneumonia, which eventually downgraded into walking pneumonia, a phrase that sounds like progress until you realize it mostly just means you are still sick but now expected to be productive about it.

By...