Last week

Because several people have asked, I'm posting about what happened to me last week.

It was Thursday morning at nursing clinicals. I had been sick for a couple of days so I wasn't feeling that great, but I was functioning. As the morning went on, a pain in my left shoulder began to develop and by noon became very noticeable. As I was breathing the pain was getting worse and I began to feel rubbing sensations in my left chest. I soon realized that I had had these symptoms before

A summer or two ago, I was sitting on a beach early in the morning and stood up only to have a very sharp pain in my left shoulder. I tried to walk back to my hotel room but quickly found myself very short of breath. It turned out that my left lung had randomly partially collapsed, medically what is called a spontaneous pneumothorax. I ended up spending a week and a half in the hospital with chest tubes and eventually had to have surgery to correct the problem.

I was hoping that this time the same thing wasn't happening, but I couldn't ignore it. On the way to my university's clinic, I felt more rubbing/bubbling sensations and a sharp increase in pain so that when I finally made it to the clinic, I couldn't take even a partial breath of air without it feeling like a knife was being placed in my shoulder. The clinic assessed me and then sent me off to get a chest x-ray which meant I had to drive to another clinic in Chattanooga. On my way there, something happened. I had an odd bubbling sensation and simultaneously all my pain and shortness of breath left. It took about five seconds to go from a knife stabbing to a state as if nothing had ever happened. When I finally got my chest xray, there was no evidence of anything. What happened on the way to the doctor's office I do not know but two weeks later, none of the symptoms have returned. Unless there's something I don't understand, a pneumothorax doesn't resolve that fast with no evidence.