A medical mystery that took 40 years to solve

Imagine being told you had a chronic illness, only to find out years later that it was never the problem.

Dan Yung's symptoms all pointed to a common chronic ailment, but turns out it was anything but common, and it took 40 years to solve.

"Well, it started way back when I was probably 29, 30," Yung recalls. "I was just constantly coughing and my lungs would fill with fluid, kind of like if you had bronchitis."

The symptoms would become worse when he laid down, and bad enough that he sought help.

"I went to a to a a pulmonologist way back then, and they just told me I had allergy induced asthma," Dan said.

The doctor prescribed an inhaler, and despite using it, the problems persisted. Then came the chronic pneumonia.

What followed was an odyssey of doctors appointments, more medications, and another diagnosis: acid reflux. But despite medications, still no relief.

" I couldn't sleep," Dan remembered. "I'd wake up in the middle of the night and just get up and go walk the neighborhood, settle everything down,."

He suffered four decades of misery, but then things were getting even worse. Dan could barely keep food down. He had to sleep upright, and then an x-ray showed worrisome spots on his lungs.

That's when he found himself at University Hospitals Cleveland Medical Center with an appointment with pulmonologist Dr. Shine Raju.

"He looked at the scans and said he didn't think it was cancer," Dan told us.

But then Raju asked something no other doctor had asked before.

"'Tell me your story,'" Dan says he told him. "'What's going on?'"

Monica Robins reports. --

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