What this grandfather thought was just a runny nose turned out to be something much more scary

A grandfather in North Carolina thought that the runny nose he had been dealing with for years was an allergy.

It turned out that it was much worse and that it could have been fatal if it had not been treated properly.

Greg Phillpotts told WTVD that he thought his runny nose was his usual allergies.

"I have an annual allergy that occurs in February," Phillpotts said. "Sometimes it's not going to go away, understand, sometimes I have to go get some Jamaican roots to drink, anything to stop the cough."

Last year, he said that the situation had worsened.

"I was preparing a meal and, you know, I was standing in the kitchen and that was adding to the ingredients," he said. "You could be anywhere, you could be on the plane, anywhere, you could talk to someone and this thing would come straight from your face. . "

He discussed diagnosis after diagnosis before meeting Dr. Alfred Iloreta. Iloreta discovered that Phillpotts was suffering from a leak of cerebrospinal fluid. Doctors say that the disease is very rare.

"Sometimes, when this fluid leak comes from the brain, it can progress to an ascending infection, so the infection can spread or the bacteria can pass from the nose to the brain, causing meningitis," Iloreta explained.

Iloreta says that the meningitis that could result has a 50% mortality rate.

After a minimally invasive surgery on Phillpotts' skull, the doctors were able to repair the leak.

"Have you ever been so congested that you can not breathe, and suddenly you can breathe again, you know what relief it was?" Phillpotts said.