Doctors Called It Allergies for Years. It Was a Fungus Growing In Her Lungs.

For a long stretch, Autumn assumed her cough was nothing more than seasonal allergies. She reached for the usual over-the-counter remedies and kept going about her life. Then she began coughing up blood — and that’s when she knew something was genuinely wrong.

She switched doctors, and this one took a different approach: he went back through her old X-rays and noticed something that had apparently been missed before. A follow-up CT scan revealed the real culprit. It wasn’t allergies, a cold, or the flu — it was Valley fever, a fungal lung infection that had been developing quietly for months while everyone around her chalked it up to a stuffy nose and itchy eyes. Autumn is now facing lung surgery to remove it.

Valley fever, known clinically as coccidioidomycosis, comes from inhaling spores of a fungus found in soil across the southwestern U.S. and parts of the Pacific Northwest, Mexico, and Central and South America. Wind, construction, or a passing dust storm can kick the spores airborne. Most people who breathe them in never get sick, but for those who do, the symptoms — cough, fatigue, fever, chest pain — look almost identical to allergies or a cold. That overlap is a big reason cases go undiagnosed for so long, and public health researchers have flagged a sharp rise in reported cases across the Southwest in recent years.

Autumn’s story points to a broader habit: too many people self-diagnose respiratory symptoms and move on, because a cough feels too routine to investigate further. Real testing — rather than guesswork — is the only way to know whether allergens are actually behind the symptoms. Companies like Curex now offer hospital-grade blood testing that can confirm or rule out allergies with real data, and when pollen, dust mites, pet dander, or mold turn out to be the cause, patients can move into targeted treatment such as sublingual immunotherapy, which work to retrain the immune system rather than just mask symptoms.

When test results don’t line up with an allergy diagnosis, that’s the signal to keep looking rather than keep treating symptoms that were never allergies at all — as the CDC’s overview of Valley fever makes clear, catching it early matters. A persistent cough is usually nothing serious. But “usually” isn’t “always,” and a simple test can be the difference between fast relief and a much bigger diagnosis down the road.