I'm Back

It's been a weird month.

A rare quiet moment

Several years ago, in one of those Christmas book exchanges, I received The Magic Mountain by Thomas Mann. It took me more than a year to finish the 729 page epic, but it was one of the best books I ever read. The story concerns a young man’s visit to a sanatorium, what we would now call a tuberculosis retreat, in the Swiss Alps. It’s odd to think about, but just over a hundred years ago, there wasn’t much to be done if you got really sick. At the retreat they passed the time gossiping, playing cards, and hiking. Then, usually, they died.

On the last day of the US Amateur Team East tournament in February 2025 I started feeling off. By the time I boarded my plane home, I had developed a full-blown cold. After a few days of rest at home I felt better, but afterwards I couldn’t stay healthy for more than a few days at a time. I would get better, but then one of my kids would get sick, I would catch it, and the whole cycle would repeat itself.

I had been warned about this part of having toddlers. Everyone said this was just part of being a parent. Still, I couldn’t help noticing that my wife seemed to be coping better than me. Sure, she was tired, and she got sick sometimes, but she seemed to be energized by time with the kids. In contrast, I woke up every morning feeling exhausted, wondering how I would make it through the day.

It was difficult to explain what was going on, even to myself. Was I depressed? Sick? Was this just what it felt like to have young kids and a job?

After a few months like this, I woke up one night with an aching pain in both of my ears. From that night on, my ears never went back to normal. Sometimes pain, sometimes congestion, sometimes ringing. At one point I lost much of the hearing in my left ear only for it to come back a month later. Then the same thing happened to my right ear. It seemed as though my symptoms were getting stranger and more troubling.

I began to contemplate the humiliating possibility that USATE might literally kill me. It was around this period that I wrote several posts criticizing the structure of chess tournaments in the United States. Looking back at those posts, there’s a level of vitriol that probably had more to do with my immune system than the specifics of tournament chess. Nonetheless, I still 100% believe most tournaments would be better with shorter time controls.

In any case, after months of fatigue and ear weirdness, I started experiencing chest pain and shortness of breath. Over the next few days it got worse. In addition to the chest pain, I was waking up drenched in sweat. I went to the ER and was diagnosed with pneumonia. They sent me home with antibiotics that they said should clear it up, but after a few days on the antibiotics, I wasn’t getting any better. I went back to the ER. This time they admitted me to the hospital, a place I had largely managed to avoid until the age of 40.

If you’ve never had an extended hospital stay, I would recommend avoiding it if possible. Everyone there was very nice and professional, but it’s not a pleasant experience. I was in a small room in the ER for over 24 hours before being admitted to my hospital room. As they believed I might have an infectious respiratory disease, I got a room to myself. This was at least a stroke of good luck — a roommate would have been a nightmare.

Still, I was largely confined to a small, uncomfortable bed, and surrounded by devices that constantly beeped and malfunctioned. Hospital employees came in and out of the room at all hours to check in, fix the equipment, and draw blood. I hate having my blood drawn. No matter how much I try to focus on something else (chess, usually), when the needle goes in I feel like I’m going to pass out. Now technicians were marching into my room multiple times a day with stacks of vials. One after another, the tests came back negative. It seemed I didn’t have an infection, or if I did, it was something incredibly rare or weird. Eventually the doctors began to suspect an autoimmune disorder. In other words, my body was attacking itself.

My wife Ali sat in the room with me most of the time. A neuroscientist with a background in physiology, she had a much deeper understanding of what the doctors were saying. We began to learn the rhythms of the hospital and joked about the personalities of the different medical teams. There were the pulmonary guys, who we took to calling the lung bros; the awkward infectious disease crew, who clearly loved nothing better than nerding out on rare diseases; and the rheumatology team, three stylish and chatty young women.

In an effort to get more information, the doctors ordered a bronchoscopy, which involves snaking a tube past the vocal chords to take a chunk from the top of the lungs. This in turn caused one of my lungs to collapse, which they had warned me might happen. To fix the collapsed lung they had to insert a tube through my chest. “There was an old woman who swallowed a fly…” The procedure would be carried out by one of the lung bros, supervised by an attending doctor. While I had been under general anesthesia for the bronchoscopy, I would be awake for the lung tube.

As the lung bro set up his supplies, I suddenly had what in poker we would call a read. “How many of these have you done?” I asked. “Several,” he responded, a moment too late. I found this to be a troublingly vague response. They laid a drape over my head so I would not see the procedure.

“Usually we do these on old women,” explained the attending doctor from behind the drape. “You’ve got thicker pec muscles, so it’s going to hurt a bit.” It was at this point I knew for sure he was full of shit. If you’ve seen me at a chess tournament, you’ll have noticed that such thickness as resides in my body is far more in the butt than the chest region. It was true though: having a tube pushed through your chest does hurt.

I could recall several occasions watching football where a particularly vicious head-on hit caused a player’s lung to collapse. I wondered how they got the tube through those guys’ pecs. I think they may go through the back. But then, how do they sleep? For me, I had one very tough night sleeping on my back, but fortunately the lung reattached and they were able to remove the tube after only one day.

After a lot more tests and debate, the doctors settled on the diagnosis of Granulomatosis with Polyangiitis (GPA). It’s a rare autoimmune disorder that affects about 3 in 100,000 people. The disease is characterized by inflammation in your smaller blood vessels. It used to be called Wegener’s Granulomatosis, but Wegener got kicked out of the name for being a Nazi. The inflammation causes problems in the sinuses, ears, lungs, and kidneys. It used to be fatal in a few years in most cases, but now there are good treatments.

The upshot is that I need to take medicine to tamp down my immune system. The standard treatment involves a very high dose of steroids to get the inflammation under control, then a milder immunosuppressant for maintenance. In most cases this allows people to feel better and get back to their normal lives, but with an increased susceptibility to catching infections.

On one level, it was a relief to have a diagnosis. I wasn’t just lazy or sad, as I had suspected. I was really sick.

After about a week in the hospital I went home with my steroid pills. Almost immediately I started to feel much better. My appetite for food returned. I had energy to do things. I had ideas about the future. I was also juiced out of my gourd. Unable to sleep, and with nothing else to do, I played online speed chess around the clock. I would go to sleep around 9, wake up between 1 and 3 a.m., wide awake, and go up to my office to play games for the rest of the night.

Within a few days, my blitz rating went from 2500 to over 2700. I believe this was due to several factors. First, a lot of practice. I went from playing a few games a week to dozens per day. I started seeing around corners. I spotted the traps my opponents were planning and was ready with counter-traps three or four moves ahead. Second, lack of distractions. I had cancelled all lessons and largely been relieved of childcare duties. Third, my body, organs, and brain were no longer completely fucked. Drugs, it turns out, are pretty amazing.

Despite playing many hours of chess a day , I was also getting far more done. While I was sick I had a constant feeling of being crunched for time. It turned out I had plenty of time, I just couldn’t do anything. With my newfound energy I crossed off items that had been on my to-do list for months. I learned a new opening repertoire. I built and tuned a huge number of Magic decks, which I then used to grind to Mythic status on Magic Arena. This is said to take a long time, but I had all night.

I upgraded my wardrobe. Finding jeans that fit has always been a challenge for me (remember the butt?). While I was sick, I went to a fancy men’s clothing store to try to solve the problem, but it was a disaster. As we arrived I started to feel especially bad. I tried on various pairs of jeans with a mounting sense of dysphoria. Everything seemed off. I left the store empty handed, embarrassed for wasting the sales person’s time.

Now I returned to the same store with a clear sense of purpose. The first pair of jeans I tried on fit perfectly. I was in and out in 15 minutes, with two pairs of jeans and a cardigan, delighted with my purchases.

In a follow-up meeting the doctor asked how I was doing. “To be honest,” I said, “I’m having a blast.”

My wife was surprised. She assumed I was playing games all night as a way of managing stress. Quite the contrary, I was living out my teenage fantasy. It reminded me of the exchange from Arrested Development when George Sr. goes to prison:

“You’re doing time.”

“I’m doing the time of my life!”

I am cognizant, in all this, of incredible privilege. I had the luxury of being able to shut down my whole life for a month with virtually no repercussions. From the time I got very sick, I cancelled all chess lessons. My wife and our parents took over almost all of my childcare duties. I had access to very high quality medical care – the team at Nebraska Medicine, and a leading rheumatology researcher whom Ali was able to access through her network. It could have been much worse. GPA is often not caught until it causes severe damage to the lungs or kidney.

Of course, the party can’t last forever. As fun as it is, sleeping three hours a night and playing games all day would eventually destroy me. Oddly enough, the last thing they are testing for before ramping down the steroids is tuberculosis. It’s very rare in the United States, but I travelled a lot in my twenties, and in some parts of the world you can contract traces without showing symptoms. Once that is ruled out, they will start to dial down the steroids and switch to a milder immunosuppressant. If all goes well, this will let me get back to my normal life.

At some point I’ll have to grapple with how I want to adjust my lifestyle to being immunocompromised. For example, will I go back to OTB tournaments? But for the moment, I find it hard to worry too much. It feels too good to have my life back.