As the Hazen Fire burns south of Buckeye, the smoke is making it hard for people with Valley fever

LAUREN GILGER: And now let’s turn to someone who is personally impacted by this wildfire — the Hazen Fire burning near Buckeye — and the bad air quality it’s bringing with it. Kathleen Muldoon is a professor at a local medical school who lives in north Peoria not too far from where the wildfire is burning. And she has Valley fever.

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Hazen Fire: The latest on the wildfire near Buckeye

Greg Hahne

The Hazen Fire is burning about a mile south of Buckeye residential areas and is bordering State Route 85. As of Tuesday afternoon it stood at 1049 acres and reached 10% containment overnight.

The disease caused by a fungal infection is common across the Southwest and California but highly underdiagnosed and for some, it can impact their health for years.

Kathleen is one of those patients and she’s on the line now to tell us more about what it’s like during wildfire season. Good morning, Kathleen.

KATHLEEN MULDOON: Good morning, Lauren, thanks for having me.

LAUREN GILGER: Thank you for coming on. So, let me just ask you first, like when you heard a wildfire burning south of Buckeye, what did you think?

KATHLEEN MULDOON: I thought, man, this is going to be a rough week for me. Right away. I mean I knew I could already sense it in my chest before I opened the door to smell the fire.

LAUREN GILGER: And you can smell it there?

KATHLEEN MULDOON: Oh, yeah, we can smell it in the mornings ... even this morning, a few days in, it smells like there's a wood fire burning just down the neighborhood.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow. So, how does this impact your health as someone with Valley fever and who has had it for a long time? We just heard Randy Cerveny talk about the air quality impacts. What does it feel like for you?

KATHLEEN MULDOON: The best way I can feel it, I can describe it — and I don't know if you can hear it in my voice but I can certainly hear kind of a graveliness, but it hurts in my chest to speak, it's almost like a heaviness. I used to describe it more along the lines of, you know, it felt like a donkey had kicked me in the chest.

But someone who had grown up with asthma I think put better language to it for me, because I never had any kind of respiratory illnesses until four years ago now, is that I can feel my lungs. Like I can feel a pressure when I'm trying to push air out. And as you mentioned, I'm a professor so I talk for a living — and it's exhausting.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. So I want to back up and talk about that four years you mentioned, right? Like you found out you had Valley fever in 2022. You were admitted to the hospital that year, diagnosed with pneumonia. And it was a while until you were able to find a doctor to look at the scan of your lungs and figure out what was really wrong.

KATHLEEN MULDOON: Yeah, in fact, I was never admitted. I went to the ER, but I was kind of sent away after a few hours and some scans with a generalized diagnosis of pneumonia, you know, with areas of lung collapse, but no treatment, no diagnosis. I had to pursue it myself ... Since then I've learned that even here in Arizona where Valley fever is prominent and endemic, it can take three weeks to a month to get a diagnosis.

LAUREN GILGER: Wow. So what did you think, like when the doctor looked at that X-ray of your lungs and you said one was all white basically, it was not black as it should have been.

KATHLEEN MULDOON: Yeah, on an X-ray, you know, empty air space which should be filling your lungs is black and I think I went to the ER on Aug. 1 and wasn't until October until I found a pulmonologist who actually pulled up the scans. And, yeah, just looking at all that opaque whiteness as if there's something dense in your lungs, as if it's bone, was shocking. And made a lot of sense given how hard it had been for me to catch my breath, how exhausted I felt, how much strain it felt just to produce the air to have a conversation, let alone give a lecture.

LAUREN GILGER: Yeah. And as we mentioned this is really common especially here in Arizona. It's this fungus that's sort of found in the dust here that people breathe in. A lot of Valley fever cases, you know, clear up and don't last so long. Why has yours lasted so many years?

KATHLEEN MULDOON: I don't think anyone knows, right? It's one of these things where we don't know how our individual physiology responds to the fungus. And why I wasn't able to fight it off, I don't think is exactly known. I was never given fluconazole, which is a standardized treatment anti-fungal. I was given antibiotics with the misdiagnosis at the very beginning, and I have read some — I don't know if it damaged, I don't know if it prolonged my treatment but it certainly wasn't the appropriate course of treatment for a fungus in my body.

So, I just — I don't know that that's known. It's one of those things where there's something individual about our responses to the various attacks, you know, that come to us just by living life ... I just don't know that level of science has caught up yet.

LAUREN GILGER: So, you, I know, still wear a mask in lots of places over your mouth and nose because of your Valley fever. I'm guessing you're staying inside a lot right now as you don't want to breathe in that smoke. But tell us like all of the maybe little ways in which still having Valley fever today has really impacted your life.

KATHLEEN MULDOON: Well, I think wearing the mask is the first thing because, you know, people automatically assume or they'll even ask, like "Are you sick, why are you wearing that mask?" It's become stigmatized in some way even though I would have hoped that it would, you know, go unquestioned that I'm either protecting myself or somebody else that I love, you know, from the various communicable diseases that we can get from being — living in community with each other.

So, you know, constantly having to explain or just feeling stigmatized by that. But I think as you mentioned in the last segment, it's been a little bit of cooler weather, so we have to keep our doors closed and not able to enjoy that right now because the air quality, I just don't want that smoke in my house.

I'm very conscientious, I have three children, about how they play outside and the wind conditions and the weather conditions. I spend a lot of time looking at the weather report, which actually the air quality doesn't always reflect how I experience the air, and I just have taken some time to rethink my baseline and what exposure means for me. So I definitely take different precautions about going outside, about masking even outdoors — especially now this past week even as I go from like, you know, the parking lot to my office.

LAUREN GILGER: What do you want people to know about this, Kathleen, about this disease, the impacts of it, the way you live your life because of it?

KATHLEEN MULDOON: You know, Valley fever is something that we're all exposed to, it's not, you know, I think a textbook explanation can be, you know, if there's construction or if you're gardening or if you work in landscaping. But there is so much environmental exposure just with the monsoon seasons or as the winds pick up that I think many of us are exposed to inhaling this fungus at any time.

And knowing that can help people take precautions about how they want to protect their respiratory system when they are outside and not just during dust storms, but just as someone who lives in Arizona.

If you are feeling like flu-like symptoms that don't go away, I would ask for a Valley fever test because it's not often given given that the symptoms are kind of just can be any number of things. But we are in a highly endemic area, and I do believe that patient advocacy and asking for that test, you know, in urgent cares or your doctor's office if you are going in not feeling right, can go a long way to getting the appropriate treatment earlier in the course of the disease.

LAUREN GILGER: OK, we'll leave it there. Kathleen Muldoon, a professor at a local medical school, she lives in north Peoria. Kathleen, thank you very much for coming on the show, I really appreciate it.

KATHLEEN MULDOON: I appreciate you, thank you.