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I've had an spontaneous pneumothorax when I was a teenager. Had to undergo emergency surgery with only local anesthesia. The surgeon while cutting my chest aske
by marcodiego 5y ago
I've had an spontaneous pneumothorax when I was a teenager. Had to undergo emergency surgery with only local anesthesia. The surgeon while cutting my chest asked: "You're sure it is this side, right?", which I confirmed. He then said: "Ok, if you're wrong I'm not going to jail alone."
- philliphaydon 5y agoWas it the right side... I feel like the story ended too quickly other than you survived to write this...
- knicholes 5y agoIt sounds like the surgeon believed that if being misled, op would also be joining the surgeon in jail. Perhaps the wrong side was chosen and the surgeon moved to the other side to finish what was originally intended.
- sfe22 5y agoHow did you get it. Was it a major accident?
- epmaybe 5y agoNo, these things just happen for a variety of reasons. Smoking/vaping puts you at higher risk. There's probably other risk factors too.
- bocytron 5y agoYeah, if you're tall and thin as well. https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2950234/ https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2950234/
- Ovah 5y agoThe most common category is "primary spontaneous". Predominantly young (85% <40yo), healthy males (6 times more common). Smoking contributes, and I believe being tall and skinny does so as well.
- jacobmartin 5y agoShort and fat--never a smoker. Still collapsed my right one and then the left one a week later. The doctors said they'd never seen that (bilateral in such a short timespan with no apparent cause) and had no idea what could be causing it. I had to laugh. Pectoris Excavatus or other skeletal abnormalities can cause it but I don't have any of those either. Just luck of the draw I guess.
- marcodiego 5y agoSpontaneously! My lung simply ruptured. I was lying in my bed when it happened the first time.
- praptak 5y agoWait, there were more times it happened to you?
- mrtranscendence 5y agoIf you get one you’re more likely to have other incidents, unfortunately.
- marcodiego 5y agoSee my other comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30710381 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=30710381 Sometimes it feels like a time bomb. I've been living with it for so long I just don't care anymore, it actually makes no difference in my life or plans. It prevented me from becoming a military pilot though.
- jtbayly 5y agoIt's a funny quote, but I'm really not sure what the doctor meant...
- vocram 5y agoWhile the surgeon was pointing to the left side of OP, they just answered “it’s the right side” meaning that the right side was the right side … Guess what the surgeon did.
- taneq 5y agoThis is why I say “correct” instead of saying “right.”
- hammock 5y agoDoesn't help if the doctor's question was "Am I cutting into the right side?"
- saary 5y agoWhen I've practiced as a paramedic the best practice was to ask the patient to point to the pain and not just verbally confirm
- sjmm1989 5y agoThis is probably the smartest move. When I am dealing with someone who doesn't seem to understand what I am saying due to language barrier, I start dealing with physical communication instead however possible. It can look odd, and be sort of funny to witness; but it works a charm more often than not. There are just some things we all generally understand once the body becomes involved.
- lostlogin 5y agoTwo confusing ones I hear are: “It’s my right, your left” (not common but has occurred multiple times). The more frequent one is where someone is trying to say “medial side of left leg” and say “it’s the right side of of my left leg”.
- taneq 5y agoIf all else fails the penis points to the problem.
- kmano8 5y agoThis happened to me in college. Driving home from the movies, chest started to hurt on inhale .. I decided to "sleep it off", which obviously didn't work. Went to the ER in the morning. Got the chest tube and spent about a week seeing if it would heal naturally, then they removed the offending part of my lung, and did a mechanical pleurodesis (a procedure that sticks your lung to the chest wall so it can't collapse). All-in, was over two weeks in the hospital, and a good bit of recovery after. I fit the 5'9", young, male, otherwise healthy group described here.
- sjmm1989 5y agoI've gotten similar for a long time while growing up. Still get this now and then on my left side. Always my left side. I just stretch, breath deep despite the pain and sleep it off. It... usually goes away within a day or two. The reason why I've always taken this approach is because it was always just growing pains or my ribs pinching me somehow. (Apparently that's a thing.) That all said and done, the last time it happened I was genuinely curious and concerned, cause the last time before that I had it happen was years and years ago. And I'm not exactly growing anymore, etc. Not precisely. But yeah. 5'6, still young-ish, and otherwise healthy I think.
- marcodiego 5y agoBeware that even a spontaneous primary pneumothrax can turn into a tension pneumothrax, a condition when a natural one-way valve forms and continuously increases pressure inside the chest eventually compressing heart and arteries. Even a spontaneous primary pneumothrax must be handled seriously. It can become life threatening.
- sjmm1989 5y agoThanks for the heads up. It's been a while since the last episode, so I kind of doubt this is a thing for me at the moment. But I will keep that in mind the next time I have un-ending pinching and cramping pains on the left side of my chest. Don't worry, far left side. Not near the heart.
- 5y ago
- iso1210 5y agoI did some hostile environment training a while back, one of the medical courses was about "sucking chest wounds", where someone gets shot (or stabbed), and the action of breathing fills the chest cavity and thus means the lung can't work. It's been a long time since I did the course as I went a few years without having to travel to the kinds of places where it's likely I'd need to apply it, but I do remember a plastic bag and vasseline was recommended if you didn't have a magic sucking chest wound plastic cover thing with a valve on (our med kits contain things like that and tourniquets as well as the usual stuff - including packs of sterile needles etc).
- mbubb 5y agoThe civilian version of this class us called TECC (in the US) i took it last october- quite good. It is an adaptation of the military TCCC “combat casualty“ class. Thus class was specifically for EMTs and Paramedics but there us a more general class called “stop the bleed” intended fir more general audience. I think everyone should take a cpr/bls class and stop the bleed if they can. Good skills!
- mbubb 5y agoso funny you mention the vaseline impregnated gauze. I have had more than one instructor say the best thing to use as a chest seal is the wrapper itself. Vaseline sucks to try and tape down. The metallic shiny wrapper it comes in makes a nice seal though.
- buck4roo 5y agoThe Bolin Chest Seal is a sterile occlusive chest wound dressing for treating open pneumothorax and preventing tension pneumothorax...
- mikeryan 5y agoAbout three years ago I got in a mountain bike crash and broke my collar bone and three ribs, managed to ride off the mountain (for any locals it was the Mailboxes trail in Santa Cruz) drove home to the East Bay and walked into the ER. They did the first round of X-rays and were about to let me go since there's not much they do with ribs and collar bones these days. The last minute the Doc came back in and told me that breaking my first rib is pretty difficult and they wanted a few more X-rays which is when they found my pneumothorax and shit hit the fan. I was suddenly in a neck brace and had a Doctor shoving a tube into my chest and had to spend three days in a trauma ward to make sure everything was okay. All this being said, I knew I had a broken Collarbone right after the fall, but outside of that I literally rode my bike three miles off the hill and drove home for an hour and walked into the ER, and was about to leave feeling fine. It's somewhat "common" for these to be missed after traumatic accidents - though most ER's know to look for them.
- LorenPechtel 5y agoI used to know someone that only went to the doc a few days after the traffic accident. Incomplete neck fracture, hanging by a thread. One wrong move and she would have dropped dead on the spot.
- geophile 5y agoLike a few people here, I also had spontaneous pneumothorax as a teenager, a few times. Never severe, no medical intervention required (beyond diagnosis), which I'm finding a bit strange, based on what others here are writing. This was in 1975, so maybe procedures are different now? Anyway, I want to discuss two specific things. 1) At the time, being a young college student, I pigged out on junk food, often popcorn that I would pop in a pot using oil. I came to associate my cooking popcorn in this way with pneumothorax occurrences. 2) I was tall and quite underweight. I'm wondering if other young people who had spontaneous pneumothorax tend to be shaped similarly.
- jahewson 5y agoPerhaps insufficient protein in your diet could have contributed? It can cause connective tissue problems in adolescent athletes, so it’s not implausibly linked.