Friday, April 3, 2009

Pneumothorax

First I'll give those who don't know what pneumothorax is a place to gain some knowledge.

So after you've read the wiki-article, you should know a bit more about pneumothorax. I wouldn't be telling anyone to read about it without a good reason, so here's one, I just had a pneumothorax attack on Tuesday.
Honestly, I haven't felt anything that painful in my 16 years. I had just got on the bus and felt a slight pain in my chest, at first, I didn't think anything about it. Than as the pain slowly increased, and felt sharper when I breathed, I thought of pneumothorax. Since three people in my church had been sick with it, I'd heard of it before, and since I fit the description(According to Wikipedia" Primary spontaneous pneumothorax is most common in tall, thin men between 17 and 40 years of age, without any history of lung disease.") of the high risk group, they said that I was probably going to be the next.
So, when I got to school, by which time it was hurting like hell, I called my parents, they picked me up at school and drove me to the emergency room at the NTU hospital.
Once there, my suspicions were confirmed, and to cut a long story short, I waited until 13:30 and got a minor surgery done. Basically, the doctor just injected some anesthesia in my chest, which is not something I'd like to go through again, and stuck a tube into my chest. He then used a syringe connected to the tube in my chest to suck the air , a total of 1350 ml, out of my chest cavity. But to be safe, I had to stay another 5 hours(Which in the end was aprox. 7 hours) and get two more chest X-rays(bringing the total number of X-rays taken up to 3) to make sure I was good to go home. So in the end I spent about 12 hours in the hospital.

I guess I could say that it was quite an experience since I hadn't felt any pain as strong as this and I did learn a lot more about the disease.But these still don't make up for it, which is obvious, so I guess that's the end of that....(What kind of sentence is that??)