Originally Published by The Kansas City Star
For six hours in a Saint Luke’s Hospital emergency room recently, Dakota Allen worried that he might become a fatal pneumonia statistic. He’d been coughing for weeks. “I overlooked it,” said the 20-year-old who works two jobs, one of them at Operation Breakthrough in Kansas City. “I thought it could be early flu. “Then it just got to the point where I was coughing pretty regularly and I went to the CVS MinuteClinic. That’s when I was first diagnosed with pneumonia.”