08/20/2006 -- troy
My pain displacement is different from a normal pnemothorax. I was driving home from the store when I felt a my shoulder tighten up. When I got home it moved to my back and chest. I went to the bedroom, where my girlfriend was, because I knew something was wrong. The pain moved to my lower back and once it hit my left side, I hit the floor. It was extreme pain that wouldn't give. The firemen arrived and told me that it was a back spasm. Once the ambulance arrived the firemen told me to get up. What!? No way, I can't! "You can refuse service but you will probably just call us back". I said that I would get up and I tried to get up but it was too painful. "You can get up or we can pick you up but if we pick you up, it's gonna hurt a lot more, it's hard to get the gurney here because of the walls". I finally crawled out the door and up the stairs to the ambulance. I was taken to the hospital and shot up with everything in the book, had the tube installed (didn't hurt)and was sent home 3 hours after the surgery (7 hours total) while I vommited out the door and all the way home from the drugs (thanks for the barf bucket). I come back in for a checkup the next day. I was there for 6 hours and saw the doc for a total of 45 seconds. The nurse came in and said that I should have been outta there hours ago. I said, it's cool, you guys must be busy. He said that they weren't even busy and he's been trying to pressure the doc to get me outta there for a long time. Anyways he just sent me home with a referal to the specialist. Next day the specialist wonders why I am at home walking around with a 20" tube sticking outta my chest. "You shouldn't have been let out of that hospital with that tube, especially without talking to a pulmonary specialist". Whatever, he pulls the tube. Next day it re-collapses. I get sent home again because it was less than 25%. So I am at the hospital everyday for 7 days, sent home everytime (guess my lungs are less important than beds at the hospital), different doc everytime. I finally talked to the surgeon yesterday (referred by the doctor). He explained everything to me. I was born with these blebs, which are air bubbles on the lung. I was short as a kid and had a fast growth spurt. My lungs grew with the rest of me as did the blebs. Everything stretched out and thinned out including the blebs. 10 years later one of them decided to rupture. It's now like a domino effect. I have a 70% chance of it happening again in my left lung. The surgery, which invloves cutting out all of the blebs and sticking my lung to my chest wall, will bring that percentage down to less than 10%. My right lung, however, has a 30% chance of collaping. I go in for surgery on Wednesday. Until then, I will be living off of percocet. I wonder what they will give me after the surgery. Oxycotin?
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