From Hidden Brain Media, I'm Shankarvedantam. This is my unsung hero, stories where one person reached

out to help another in a time of need.

Hello, I would like to thank my unsung hero.

He invited me to come over for Christmas because we're both...

We were my unsung heroes.

I just want to say thank you.

Today's story comes from Julie Silverman.

In 2018, Julie developed a bad cough out of the blue.

She had allergies, so her doctors assumed... Julie developed a bad cough out of the blue.

She had allergies, so her doctors assumed they were the cause.

But over the next years, her symptoms just kept getting worse and worse.

And that's when I kind of started on this journey at first with my primary care doctor trying to figure out what was happening and I was sent for tests into multiple different doctors and no one could find anything.

So in the meantime I do have allergies so I had started going to this allergy clinic

for weekly allergy shots and that is where I met Allison.

She started as a nurse practitioner there and she did a couple

evaluations of me and she was really kind of perplexed by this cough and you know she was

often asking me how I was doing and I had at this point gotten kind of dismissive about it because I had been dismissed by so many doctors is there's nothing wrong. It's just you're not responding to our treatments. We'll try something else and etc.

etc. So as more time goes by I was in there one day and

Allison was noting that I sounded much worse, a very hoarse voice, very breathless,

wheezing along with my coughing and she was just adamant something was wrong with

my airway and so she went and got one of the physicians and said you

need to do a scope and look at her tracheos. I just know something is wrong. So a physician came

...