Holy Pneumothorax, Batman!

Pneumothorax…not fun.  This week started off well.  I had planned some sax playing with the Hendricksons, some praying in the prayer room, and some ultimate frisbee playing.  Most of this didn’t happen.

On Monday, I felt fine.  Monday here is like Saturday in America, so I basically lounged around and took it pretty easy.  That evening, however, I had some ultimate frisbee scheduled at the park next to Living Water Christian Church.  I had played ultimate already this stay.  On Friday we had a rain game and it was most excellent.

We devided up the teams and began to play.  Everything went pretty well, teams were scoring fairly evenly, and everyone was having a good time.  Then, after a rather vigorous round, my heart started to throb.  Then it went from throbbing to hurting, and hurt it did until it was the most deleterious thing I have ever felt.  The symptoms all pointed to a heart attack.  It hurt there in the left side of my chest, my shoulder hurt, my neck hurt, and there were trails of pain that went up the sides of my neck and into my ears.  The latter was a little peculiar.

I sat out for the rest of the games.  I was given a bottle of water and Morgan Chen told me that I was probably just dehydrated and should find some airconditioning.  I headed up to the eleventh floor of the building the church is in and sat in from of an AC unit the size of a refrigerator for twenty minutes or so.  It helped a little, but not enough.  When everyone else went out to eat, I went home.  It was only 7pm and I wanted to sleep.

The next day I got up, went to the “222″ prayer meeting, got some prayer, and then went to the hospital.  The doctor there took some x-rays and, after an hour, told me that I had an infected muscle in between my heart and my lung.  I don’t know medicine so I though, “Well, infections heal.  Where are my pills?”  I was out of their and back to business as usual at the church.

Then, the day the doctor asked Uncle Matt to bring me back in.  On Wednesday, July 2, I was admitted to Sinlau Christian Hospital for a pneumothorax.  This is where the lung has sprung a leak and air has become trapped between the lung and the chest cavity wall.  With that air there my lung had no room to fully expand and so it remained partially collapsed.  It was time to operate.

With this sort of thing their are two options.  The first is that the doctor inserts a tube into the chest so that it sits on top of the lung and allows the air to come out, the second is an endoscopic operation where the doctor manually pushes the lung back to expansion from the inside.  I went with the former option.

By this time I was transferred to a specialist, Dr. Sy.  He spoke English very well, I was actually a bit surprised as we conversed.  I asked him where he had studied and he told me he went to Harvard.  This gave me a bit of comfort, even if he was lying I still had some confidence in my physician now.

Dr. Sy put the chest tube in in an operation performed under local anestesia.  This means that instead of putting me to sleep he just gave me some shots where he was going to cut me open so that I couldn’t feel anything.  It worked.  I fixated on a spot on the wall to  the opposite side and he did the operation with zero pain involved.  The weird thing was when the tube broke into my chest cavity.  I’ve never felt anything move around inside my body before.

After this I was put into the ER to wait for a room upstairs.  I was assigned to bed 7.  This wouldn’t have been anything special, but just a few days prior to my experience Devvy Hendrickson, the mother in the Hendrickson family here, had been taken there after she fell and dislocated her shoulder.  Not only did we have the same doctor, but she also had bed 7.  If God doesn’t have a sense of humor then coincidence is pretty funny.

I was put in a room which I shared with two other people and that would cost me $50 USD a night.  I had a bed that had a hand crank to sit me up or lay me down, a chair next to me for visitors, and a big white wall to keep me entertained.  Despite the lack of luxury that one expects after seeing American hospitals, the price consoled me.

One thing that was really cool was that I had somebody from the church with me 24/7.  People were assigned shifts and people came to take care of me, none of them complaining.  With some of them we watched movies, sometimes I just slept, and with a few I discussed ancient Chinese history.  Pretty interesting stuff.  Did you know that Confuscious wrote all of his teachings in Taiwanese?

Now, with all this prayer going on, it’s no wonder that I feel so spry and alert now.  If I didn’t have stitches in my side right now I would be outside just running the track.  Unfortunately I have to take it easy with my lungs.  Until my appointment Monday I won’t be doing any singing, saxophone playing, or yelling.  After my appointment on Monday I’ll see if I’m all better or not and I still probably won’t be doing any of these things.

I have a new task now.  I’m too photoshop myself into some pictures that depict the story of the prodigal son.  I’m going to be in an elongated skit type thing for Mark Hendrickson’s talk about it.  I’m thinking that if I was playing my saxophone I wouldn’t have time to put this together, but since I’m not I have time to work so I guess things are working out.  It will be interesting to see how this works.

That’s what I’m going to do now.  I’ve got a copy of photoshop, a laptop, and a bunch of free time.  I’ll upload some footage of my operation when I can.  Now I leave you with some horrific surgical footage of me.  Well, it’s not that bad, it’s real.

~ by demo318 on July 4, 2008.