Cut the Main Wha??

I am unique. Really.

Back in 2007 when my husband was in his last days of school and was about to graduate, my uniqueness was brought to attention at the center and front of our lives.

I went to work with an annoying right-sided chest pain. I had been working out about two to three times a week and so I brushed it off as muscle pain. I went about my business and about an hour later, I had to go use the bathroom. I remember feeling a breeze on my arm as they have just replaced the toilet paper holder with a bigger one to hold industrial-grade wipes (read: cheap, thin and scratchy). They did a bang up job of leaving a gaping hole on the wall, thus the free breeze. I finished up, washed my hands and walked back to my workstation. Suddenly, I had a massive, sharp chest pain on that same side. Was it a heart atack? No. A friend of mine said when he suffered his at the ripe old age of forty plus, it felt like an elephant sat on his chest. How he knew what that would have felt like, I forgot to ask. Was it indigestion? Heartburn? Possibly. Rice can be my mortal enemy from then on. Was it anxiety attack? Panic attack? Crazy attack? We could be on to something. Having one or a combination of all three because you think your heart is slacking off is perfectly logical. Then came the shortness of breath and the dizzy spell. Because of connections, a co-worker of mine helped me get hooked up to an EKG machine to pacify the voices in my head. My heart was fine but something else is awfully awry. A sane person would have hurried along to the emergency room save for me. So I went home and slept it off. Curiously enough, the duration and severity of pain was almost always positional and fleeting. There was also a curious extra "tok" sound on breathing, as if there is a small lung appendage breathing on its own.

On the third day, I paid my physician a visit. The office was open but she was off. Don't ask me why they were even open. They told me to go the ER. Although I had not keeled over and died yet, it still hurts to breathe. So I finally went and since it was a chest pain, the doctor saw me in no time. The diagnosis came quick, too. Pneumothorax.

Pneumothorax is the clinical term for a collapsed lung. Prior to this, my knowledge extended to this condition happening to trauma patients. A sucking chest wound, where air enters the pleural cavity and collapses the lung. Good doctor explained to me that my right lung is 10-15% collapsed. As he looked at my history, he noted that it was spontaneous (Thanks, Dr. Obvious) but could also be catamenial, meaning it is related to menstruation. Although extremely rare, I fit the textbook profile. Woman? Check. In their thirties? Check. History of pelvic endometriosis? Onset seventy-two hours before or after menstruation with a right-sided lung collapse? Check and check. He called a cardiothoracic surgeon for a consult then gave me oxygen for about three hours to see if the lung reinflates. If it remains stable or the collapse decreases, I was to be sent on my merry way home but if it increases, my physician would have to put a nifty little chest tube in to help things along. Fortunately, going home was the better option.

Why me? Because I'm unique, didn't you know? Statistics put my condition at about 3-6% accounting for spontaneous pneumothoraces which happens to about 1.2-6 in 100,000 women. (For more on this, click here).

I'm reminded of an old Rupert Holmes song in which a few lines say, "Nobody said that life is always fair, sometimes it clips your wings while you're in midair..."

Indeed.