Autoimmune, Cancer, or Blood disorder

I was diagnosed with Fibromyalgia a couple of years ago.  Several months ago, my pain and fatigue got worse.  I started having pain in my side.  I would have severe itching and pain when I got hot that only lasted minutes.  I have had a mild fever, generally 99.5 to 100.3.  I have had bronchitis 3 times, pneumonia once, and a sinus infection once...in the past 3 months.  I feel confused alot.  My blood test show highly elevated white blood cells.  First it was my lymphocytes, then it was my neutraphils, then it was my lymphocytes.  Then my WBC dropped to a normal level, but my neutrophils were really low.  The doc says she thinks its an autoimmune disease, a blood production disease or cancer.  She kind of hasn't done much for me and wants me to 'wait'.  I know there is something terribly wrong and I just found out im pregnant.  I can't afford to wait.  does anyone know what it could be?  What I can tell her to look for?

[Garth L Nicolson, PhD]

Your symptoms strongly suggest that you have an undiagnosed infection(s) that underly your condition.  Since you previously had pneumonia and sinus infections, I would start with some of the stealth infections that are responsible for most atypical pneumonia but can become systemic (causing system-wide infections) later on and result in the types of symptoms that you have listed.  Examples would be M. pneumoniae, C. pneumoniae and similar infections.  There could also be one or more chronic viral infections as well.

[kennamom]

I will look further into it...thank you.  I was on iv cipro and iv flagyl and have been on and off since I first started having pain...would that take care of the infection?  My doctor says because of that she's ruling out infection, but still hasn't done anything else.  Gotta love military docs.

[Garth L Nicolson, PhD]

You were likely not on antibiotics long enough to do much against slow-growing bacterial infections, such as cell wall deficient bacteria.  Examples are Mycoplasma species and Chlamydia pneumoniae.  These are airborne infections that cause slowly evolving chronic conditions.  They can arise from an initial bout of pneumonia or not (many patients with these infections never had pneumonia).