The importance of recognizing immunodeficiency
On a cold, blustery Cleveland day when I was a resident, a forty-year-old man walked into our infectious disease clinic at the Cleveland Clinic. The patient was undergoing routine visits in preparation for a kidney transplant. This poor man had been hospitalized six months earlier at another hospital where he caught a terrible infection and was readmitted in septic shock and multi-organ failure. Luckily he survived, but in the process …