pleurodesis

The title of my last entry was meant to be a bit of a joke. I did end up going to see the doctor again. Perhaps it was foolish to go on a Sunday half an hour before the clinic closed, when the staff were thinking about going home more than anything else. The doctor said that I had an isolated viral infection on the right side of my chest, that I should take some cough medicine, and that everything would be fine in a couple of days. All of this was based off approximately 5 seconds of listening to my chest through a stethoscope. When I probed him for some more information, he kindly mentioned that "I don't walk on water on Sundays, only on Saturdays. If you can find someone who knows why you're sick, tell them to come here because I'd like to meet them". I didn't end up taking his cough medicine.

As I was free of any drastic lung problems and was feeling pretty good and healthy, I saw no reason for me not to head over to the gym on Wednesday morning. I must have been on the mend, because I got in a pretty decent workout. Unfortunately, the coughing and spluttering returned with a vengeance on Wednesday night, and I thought that I'd better go see someone who didn't go to Hollywood Upstairs Medical College.

After a successful morning of playing around with polymers, I went to see one of the university doctors. After about 60 seconds of listening to my chest with a stethoscope, she said "I think your right lung has just about completely collapsed". I thought that would make Adrian happy. She seemed fairly concerned and sent me off to get an immediate chest x-ray. I went off to get the x-ray. The x-ray people seemed fairly concerned and sent me off to the emergency department of the Prince of Wales Hospital. I was still feeling really healthy, despite the odd coughing spurts, and was happy to finally have my problem diagnosed properly. My thought processes were somewhere along the lines of "Woohoo! Spontaneous pneumothorax! That sounds pretty cool, and it's pretty funny that Adrian diagnosed me before the quack GPs. I'll have my lung re-inflated, I'll have a bit of a chance of it happening again but who cares. I'll be better pretty soon and everything will be back to normal."

It is now two long weeks later, and I can say that things weren't so simple. I'm home at last, able to sit in my room again, able to have showers, able to walk around without carrying a chest drain, able to eat food with some pretence nutritional value, able to hear birds and see the sunlight. I'm no longer surrounded by unhappy sick people, flourescent lights, ugly rooms, drugs, tubes and needles. Still, things aren't back to normal. I've got four nice, big, sore incision wounds, and they weren't kidding when they said that mechanical abrasion of my lung would be a little uncomfortable. Que sera sera.