Medical near-miss has meaning
- posted: 26 June 2007
- scrollopinion@byui.edu
This is it,” I thought. “Just 21 years old and already my heart is giving out.”
My chest felt like it was splitting at the seams and everywhere in between, like Bruce Banner’s clothes trying to hold back a hulking transformation. The pain spread from the left chest up into the shoulder and even down the arm.
My disbelief held back the panic. This couldn’t be a heart attack, could it? At my age? I had so much left to do in life—college, marriage, fatherhood, the culmination of the Harry Potter series. I couldn’t possibly die.
The cable man was there that morning, hooking up our high-speed Internet access.
It took me five years to convince my parents that high-speed was the only way to go. Why today?
I was just sitting down. I wasn’t lifting weights, running hard, shouting at somebody or even worrying. In fact, I’d hardly a care in the world.
The pain came suddenly and fiercely. It began like a knife to the chest and grew within like the Hulk’s mushrooming muscles.
I lay on my bed for a few minutes and wondered if I’d used “lay” correctly or should have changed it to “laid.” The pain continued to swell, though I calmed at the thought of my verb-tense mastery. E.B. White would be so proud of me.
The pain increased. Sensing something was wrong, I did the only thing an independent grown man could—I called for my mother.
“I don’t feel good,” I told her. “My chest.”
So much for translating my structurally impressive thoughts into something resembling a coherent sentence.
“Just lie down, dear. It’ll be okay.”
“I don’t think you understand,” I thought. “Twenty-one years of anguish is bubbling and exploding from my slender chest. I’m dying.”
Somehow, I managed to communicate my dire situation. She asked the cable man to come back later and rushed me to the Bensonmobile, a 15-passenger civilian-grade tank.
I’ve never seen my mother go more than 5 mph over the speed limit, much less run a red light. She did both on the way to the hospital.
“Wow, Mom. I didn’t know you had it in you,” I said, as she glanced both ways at the red light and zipped through with all the naturalness of a bank robber on the run. That’s one scene I’ll watch a few times over when I’m wearing wings.
The emergency room attendants were quite professional, other than the fact that they were intolerably slow. Didn’t they know I was dying?
Three nurses, two tests and one hour later, I finally got the diagnosis: a spontaneous pneumothorax. In the common tongue, a collapsed lung.
The incident is quite common in tall, thin men between the ages of 20 and 40, and embarrassingly minor. It happens when hardened sacs at the top of the lung burst, releasing air into the chest and collapsing the lung.
Mine was only a 10-15 percent collapse, not even worth inserting a tube to remedy. The oxygen would reabsorb, the doctor said.
“Here’s some Loratab. Let us know if the pain doesn’t go away.”
I should have been relieved it wasn’t anything worse as I trudged back to the Bensonmobile. But somehow, I felt cheated, embarrassed, let down.
There I was, all ready for a health catastrophe, and all I got was a few bubbles sliding along my ribs like a skater over bumpy ice.
I learned that day to not overreact, and more importantly, that I was OK with the idea of dying. Yes, there are many important things I have yet to do. The hope that I can still accomplish them is what keeps me going.
But should I not make it that far, I’ll be OK. I’ve had a good life already, and everything that comes from here on out is just bonus.
After all, how many people get to see their mother race through a red light like a bandit with the police on her tail? 
