Diagnosis by Lisa Sanders

Author:Lisa Sanders
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Crown/Archetype
Published: 2019-08-12T16:00:00+00:00

Deflated

“Are you okay?” the man asked his wife. It was two A.M., and he’d awakened to find the bed next to him empty. He found his forty-five-year-old spouse in the living room of their weekend house up the Hudson River from New York City. She had an oxygen meter on her finger and a worried look on her face. “I can’t breathe,” she told him. She’d had chest pain and felt short of breath in the past, but her oxygen had never been this low—down to 89 or 90 percent. And the right side of her chest felt as if it were on fire.

She wanted to tough it out until morning so that they and their two young daughters could drive back to Manhattan where her doctors were—the ones who had been treating her since her right lung collapsed and all the trouble began two years earlier. That first time had been nothing like this. Back then, there was a strange click, then a feeling that something had moved. It wasn’t painful, just odd. A few days after that, she developed a cough. Her doctor thought she had a virus. When she got worse, he prescribed an inhaler. A few more days passed, and she felt out of breath just walking to the bathroom—odd for a woman who usually exercised daily. Her doctor ordered a chest X-ray and saw to his surprise that her right lung had collapsed.

She had, he explained, a pneumothorax—literally, air in the chest. It happens when there’s a tiny rupture in the lung. The air rushes out into the surrounding space, and the empty lung collapses. She was admitted to Lenox Hill Hospital the next day. A tiny catheter was inserted between her ribs into the space around the lung. The air was sucked out, allowing her lung to reexpand.

But why had she gotten this leak in the first place? She didn’t smoke, which is the most common risk factor for developing a pneumothorax. None of the tests indicated any type of lung disease, another significant risk factor. And though there are a number of inherited diseases that can predispose a person to developing a pneumothorax, no one in her family had any of them. After four days and no answers, her doctor concluded that she’d had a spontaneous pneumothorax. These are rare but are more likely to be seen in tall, thin, athletic individuals—like her—and don’t usually happen more than once.

But a year and a half later, while at work, she felt that same immediately recognizable click and shift in her chest. An X-ray revealed another pneumothorax. At Lenox Hill Hospital, her lung was again reexpanded, and Dr. Byron Patton, a thoracic surgeon, recommended a procedure known as pleurodesis, in which the lung is mechanically attached to the surrounding sac, called the pleura, so that even if the lung developed another leak, it wouldn’t collapse.

Over the next half year, the patient continued to have episodes of chest pain on her right side. Each time

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.