What's it like to have a latent TB infection?

This was one of the craziest experiences I've ever had with my health. I was starting a CNA course and in order to be able to do my clinicals I needed to get a TB skin test done. In a skin test, a small amount of tuberculin which is a pure derivative of the disease is injected into the surface of your inner arm. You then let that incubate for 48-72 hours and what you should see is that the bubble that forms should be reduced and any redness around the area should also have dissipated. This is considered to be a negative result and no evidence of the disease is found.

If a person does have a positive skin test however the process of what treatment to use immediately begins to prevent it from spreading. This is what happened with me. I had a positive result where the injection was still raised and irritated.

To start treatment, doctors will order blood work and a chest x-ray. The blood work will look for evidence of the TB virus within the patient's body and to rule out any false positives while the chest x-ray tests for presence of active disease within the lungs. For me the chest x-ray came back negative but the virus was found in my blood which indicated that I had a latent infection.

To treat this I was put on 9 months of isoniazid which is the most common antibiotic used to treat TB infections.  I was able to complete my clinicals because I did not have active disease but it was nerve wracking knowing that you have a disease like this. For those 9 months I had to watch what I ate, wasn’t allowed to drink alcohol and had to routinely go in for check ups and blood work.

The scariest part of this was that my doctors were not sure how to treat it at first. TB infections are not seen widely in america and my doctors had never had to treat it before. They had to consult with a TB expert to determine the best course of treatment. I'm now TB free but it was the weirdest thing to have happened to me health wise. To this day we still don't know how I got it as TB is not common in the US.

Reference

Tuberculosis (TB) | CDC. (2017). Cdc.gov. Retrieved 29 November 2017, from

https://www.cdc.gov/tb/default.htm