My Stupid Damn Feking Lung - The Slack Bastard.

So I woke up last Wednesday and remembered I had to go into work late, because I wanted to pay my car registration before I went, because it was overdue and my crappy car was illegal. It seems like it's spent more of it's time while I've owned it in an illegal state, or at least in state where I'm not allowed to legally drive it.

Anyway, so just as I'm leaving I go to put on my shoes. This requires me sitting on my bed to do, and while sitting down I coughed. As I did I thought "Wow, feels like I've got a deep chest infection"

As I got into my car it got really bad, I thought that someone had stabbed me in the right lung. Ouch. So I drove down to the post office to pay the rego, but got there and realised I'd left my wallet behind. So I drove back home, by now in total agony, got my wallet and drove myself into the Dr Surgery. I thought I must have strained a muscle or something stupid. After waiting in the Dr's for about 50 minutes I finally got seen and the Dr took about a minute to diagnose a feking collaopsed lung! I shit you not! So thinking she's full of shit I went over to get an X-Ray. Nope, she was right, ol' mr layabout lazy arse lung has got all fed up with being inflated and decided to pack a sad. The medical term for this is a "Spontaneous pneumothorax"

This, as they say in the medical books, is a bugger...

So back to the Doctor, who told me I'd better check into emergency straight away so they could do nasty things to me. I drove my shitbox home, and John was nice enough to drive me back into hospital. I checked into emergency and they explained what they were going to do to me.

This bit was most amusing, on my medical charts (which I looked at) my heartrate increased by 30 beats per minute. In the notes next to that entry was the comment "Dr explaining procedure to patient" !!! Scary shit.

After waiting for a few hours for blood tests to show I was fine otherwise they finally decided to hack into me. They gave me a local anasthetic and some good drugs to "cheer me up", then they stuck a big tube in me. It fitted in between my lung and chest wall, and the idea was it allowed the air to drain out of my chest so the lung could reinflate. Thankfully, it did. The tube went into a long pipe, and at the end of that pipe was a little bottle thing filled with magical "get well" fluid. So they wheeled me up to Ward 5, my home for the next 5 days. Not that I realised at the time I'd be there that long.

John came in to see me as they wheeled me up, that was very nice of him. I was very happy to find out I had to share a room with 3 other guys. Old guys. Who liked to bitch and moan and do werid shit.

Just as I got up to ward 5, dinner was served. Hurk. It wasn't very good looking. My chest hurt like a bastard, with it's tube thing sticking out of it. I had some more drugs then went to sleep. Well, I tried too, the old guys in the room with me were like children, ringing the nurse all the time, farting and snoring like machines. Far out... Erk.

Thursday morning I woke up and didn't feel too shitty. They keep trying to tell me my tube thing must really be hurting, so they wanted to feed me drugs all the time. I kept declining, because it wasn't hurting. In the end I just took them to shut them up, it was pissing me off.

I won't go into day by day, really lying around in hospital isn't that much fun. I'll just list the "highlights"

- Mostly it sucked. I was SO bored. I couldn't do anything. If I wanted to walk around I had to drag a little trolley with me with had the bottle with the magical "get well" fluid in it. Wearing drab hospital PJs. It's like it's designed to make you feel sick. It was boring... boring boring boring. I was SO glad to get out of there. There was NOTHING wrong with me, I felt 100% apart from the damn tube sticking out of me.

- There's a 20-30% chance my lung could collapse again for no reason. If that happens they'll probably operate on me so it can't happen again. I feking hope it doesn't happen again though.

- My trip to LA is cancelled. After your lung fucks itself over, you're not allowed to fly for 3 months. Yes, I'm very dissapointed about this, but hey, shit happens.

- They'd wake me up every 3 hours or so, to check my temperature, blood pressure and pulse. It got annoying, but I got used to it.

- The Staff were fantastic. Really good, really friendly. Apart from Nazi "That's not appropriate in the hospital" Nurse. Stupid cow. Obviously fun when she's on watch is not allowed. Special thanks to Mark, my nurse in the morning. He helped me get out early on Monday by speeding up the process of getting my tube removed and the followup X-Ray.

- I had 4 guys in the room with me. On Saturday night one of the old guys died. I heard everything, the nurse rushing in, the resus attempt etc. Quite scary and horrible really. I was so pissed off, I couldn't figure out how I'd gone from Wednesday being a usual day to Saturday night listening to someone die. Ugh.

- I had to stay longer than I'd hoped. My lung took a few days longer than it should have to heal. There was worry it wasn't going to heal at all and I'd need an operation. Thankfully it did heal in time, so I didn't have to go under the knife.

- Thanks to the people that came to visit me, bringing me food and stuff to do. It was really appreciated.

- I had my laptop in hospital with me, and it can play DvDs. I think this is the one thing that kept me sane.

- About 10 different people saw me while I was there, asking me questions about how I did it etc. Mostly med students wanting to use me as a case study. I wished I'd had something really cool to tell me about how I did it, but alas.

Finally on Monday I got out. They removed my tubie thing, patched me up and sent me for an X-Ray, which showed my lung was fine and all patched up.

It was so good to get out of hospital, though all I did was go home and get back into bed again. It was a hard day. Then I went out for a really nice dinner, some proper damn food. Fek it was good.

And today, I have just taken it easy, walking around in the sun, having a good day. I don't go back to work until Friday, though I'll probably work from home a bit for the next few days.

That's all people! I'm feking glad to be back. Thanks for all your support and messages over the last few days.

--TiM