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August 24, 2016
This was the date my ultrasound was scheduled...during the week following my doctor visit my shortness of breath got much worse. To the point I was wheezing, and I had to slow my pace when walking...in fact, I actually had to stop occasionally to catch my breath.
During the ultrasound, the tech asked where I was hurting, I said the left side under the rib cage so thankfully, she ignored the doctor's order to monitor the liver only. During her scan she saw fluid in the lung (she may have actually seen a mass but wouldn't tell me). She immediately sent me back to my primary doctor to get a chest x-ray. Which I did...
The x-ray showed the entire left lung as white (basically indicating it had collapsed). At this point I was sent straight to the emergency room.
I'm not going to go into the gory details, but I was pretty quickly admitted, and my lung was drained of fluid. There was so much fluid in the lung that it completely filled two of their containers in a matter of minutes. The third basically filled over the next 2 days. The insertion of the tube was uneventful as I was drugged for it. The worst part was the coughing that re inflated the lung after the initial draining. That was over 1 hour of violent constant coughing. After the coughing spell finished, I basically slept the rest of the time.
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