My experiences with the latest Pneumothorax, VATS and the healing process directly after surgery

Here's the update since having the surgery on Monday. They pulled the chest tube out today and what a relief this was! I don't know how much longer I would have been able to stand having this tube protruding from my side and being tethered to the Pleur-evac chest drainage system device. Not to mention the amount of constant pain that having this tube in has caused, at the incision site, deep in my chest and in my middle to upper back also. Every breath was painful. Just the act of repositioning my body a half inch on the bed was painful and basically everything else I did while it was in was equally as painful. So yes, I'm so happy it is finally out and not to mention that it actually stayed in during this whole process so that it could actually do it's job properly! Btw, at least I know I'm not just being a whiny-wimp by my reaction to the pain that I've experienced lately, cause my nurse did tell me that her chest tube patients seemed to have suffered the most pain of any of her patients, including those undergoing major surgeries.

Since this was my first real surgery I was feeling extra anxious about it, but as I got the first glimpse of my prep nurse as they were wheeling me into the surgery prep room, I started to feel some relief from the anxiety with the sight of her genuine, warm and caring smile. I felt that it was a blessing to have her as my prep nurse and that she definitely met her calling with this particular career path because she was as sweet and helpful as could be. So pretty much immediately they started giving me pain meds and anti-anxiety meds as well and her nurturing voice helped guide me through this process. Then they injected the general anesthesia, but I wasn't really aware exactly when they did this. All I remember is my prep nurse's smiling face, along with some other staff walking around, then waking up in a complete state of shock and  shivering probably worse than I ever have. Not sure, but it almost felt like a form of convulsions cause I do remember, not only a severe shaking, but flailing around on the operation bed and feeling extremely cold and confused, then my God....there was the PAIN. As I was just waking up and having these experiences, it seemed that everyone around me were also freaking out, and I kept asking if the surgery went OK and if I was OK, I was assured that everything was fine as they put warm blankets over me. I asked for more pain meds but they said they had already given me a tremendous cocktail of meds and they couldn't give more right then yet. So I sat there slowly waking up and warming up and finally quit shivering, but the pain was so intense in basically my entire upper body that I could not move or even budge at all. During the Video Assisted Thoracic Surgery, otherwise just called VATS, they didn't find any blebs or anything else suspicious, but they did perform a Pleurodesis, which is mechanically irritating the parietal pleura. In other words, they rough up the linings of my lungs and the lung cavity with a gauze, to make it bleed, which helps the lung stick to the cavity walls as it heals and scabs up.  By now it was late at night and obviously I was their last surgery for the day. Eventually they moved me back to my room, but I didn't have the nice "luxury" room where I had been in the ICU, but a regular private room on what they simply to referred to as "The Floor". 

Pleur-Evac lung fluid evacuation system and my chest tube

That was 3 days ago and like I said, they removed the chest tube today. Basically since they put it in during the surgery, I have not really been able to sleep. This was due to a combination of a lot of pain and the inconvenience of having the tube coming out of my side, plus the fact that just laying down or even inclining a certain amount was entirely too painful. So any sleep had to be done totally sitting up, which is even more difficult for me since I'm a stomach sleeper. LOL these conditions aren't at all conducive to really getting any decent sleep. So after they removed the tube early this afternoon, the first thing I did was just stretch out on the bed, laying down on my stomach and  going to sleep within seconds. I was able to sleep the entire afternoon without being bothered until the room service called to see if I wanted to order dinner. I hesitated since at that particular moment, food was the last thing I was concerned about, but I knew that once 6:30pm came, the room service would be closed and I wouldn't be able to eat anything until after 6:30 the next morning. Since I had been sleeping very well for the first time since before the surgery and was just jostled from a really interesting dream, I couldn't think very well, so I just asked them what they recommend. They told me today's special was butter/garlic angel hair pasta with chicken and green beans, coleslaw and melon/cantaloupe on the side. I said fine, just leave off the chicken since I'm vegetarian...then immediately went back to sleep, on my stomach.

As humans, we often take little things for granted like our health, being able to breathe well and without pain, being able to just freely get out of bed and walk around and sleeping in the position that we find most comfortable. These are things that I used to take for granted and even though I can't promise how I will feel and think in the future, I do know that now, I don't take these things for granted. I also appreciate life, health, tasty healthy food, good nurses and doctors and friends and loved ones so much more too.

Reference: 
Spontaneous Pneumothorax,
Pleurodesis,
Video Assisted Thoracic Surgery (VATS),
Pleur-Evac
Chest Tube,

flowers my friend picked from his yard

my little setup with everything at arms-reach

the food was exceptional & all produce was local and organic

closeup of my salad with computer in background

Spontaneous Pneumothorax #2 and chest tube that falls out

OK so there's been a few things that happened since I last wrote. The job search is starting to piss me off, well  the job search isn't exactly doing that but the lack of response sure is. This is how I know it's definitely time to learn some new skills and make myself marketable again, which is one reason I'm learning web development. Sure, I won't have a degree or years of experience, but I personally think that with my creative graphic design/art  Photoshop skills combined with the ability to follow logic and the capacity for analytical/problem solving skills, and hopefully a few good websites that I designed to use as my portfolio that maybe, just maybe I can gain an entry  level job in that field at some point in the near future. That would be nice since I really enjoy that type of work. But I do have a long way to go still, however I've extremely excited and motivated to learn all that I can, so just  don't bust my bubble, I do that well enough on my own thank you very much.

Right now I'm still recovering from my second collapsed lung, which they like to call a spontaneous pneumothorax. I also had the great pleasure to experience a large plastic tube being shoved into the side of my breast, through the  tissue and between two ribs, into the thoracic cavity, which is where my lungs reside. The ER doctor felt pretty  strongly that I would be safer if I didn't go under with anesthesia, just local numbing on the skin for the  incision. After interrogating him about the consequences of undergoing such surgery without anesthesia and while remaining fully awake and completely aware of the whole process, I decided to take his advice and just go for it.  Let me tell you, that was the most painful and utterly unpleasant thing I've had to endure, ever. I was thinking about how they should record someone getting a chest tube put in without anesthesia and use it for an anti-smoking  commercial. It would be quite effective. But who am I to know anything like that. I'm just an unemployed moron, with no health insurance. Anyway, I made it though the surgery with the help of my friend Dilaudid, which is  hydromorphone administered through an IV... and a lot of clinching, crying and some screaming too. Once the surgery  was over and I had the chest tube installed, my breathing started to return to normal as my lung filled up, and with the Dilauded fully kicked in, I felt pretty decent as I lay there backed in to the ER bay in my sexy hospital gown  and nose tubes. This is where I waited for a few hours until they had a room ready. It was like I was watching a  movie or TV show and since I could breath quite well and was really high, it was sort of entertaining to watch everyone performing. After I got my room, it was really difficult to get comfortable and especially sleep with all  the wires, tubes and tape all over my body, not to mention that big plastic tube that was protruding from the side  of my left breast that ended in a little contraption sitting on the floor next to my bed.

I used this time that I was bed-ridden to work on my website and to study web development, using a laptop and a  horrible Wi-Fi connection. Basically every time I clicked anything, I had to "repair" the connection, sometimes  having to refresh the browser too. It was excruciating just to do anything, but at least it worked enough to slowly  make progress and keep my mind off of everything. At one point the next day while I was plugging away at my site and  flying high from the "legal high" that I was experiencing, along with the continued pain in my chest that never  really went away, no matter how much Dilauded or Norco I had, I noticed that my chest tube was not where it was  supposed to be and not where that nice doctor put it the day before. It just happened to be lying on the floor next  to my bed, all covered in dried blood and not doing it's job. Damn it! I went though all that, just to have it end  up ineffectively lying on the floor! Oh well, they said my lung was mostly inflated and it would probably be OK. They would just watch me and take a lot of X rays for the next few days and it should all be fine.

So here I am a couple days after getting out and I can breathe quite well, but it still hurts to breathe deep and especially to cough. I'm not convinced that I'm out of the woods yet with this and to be honest, I'm a little scared  too. Now in the course of just 6 weeks, both of my lungs have collapsed... for no apparent and obvious reason, other  than I used to smoke, but I've known a lot of smokers and I don't think I know of any who have had a collapsed lung,  but what do I know. I'm just an unemployed moron. It was one thing when I just had the one lung collapse, because I  have another one, but when the other one collapsed too, and after a 3 day hospital stay, that I still feel a lot of  pain and tightness that I felt before going on to the hospital, I'm actually scared and not really sure what to do. It also doesn't help much that I don't have health insurance. If I keep having to go to the hospital, will they eventually tell me to fuck off, or what?

Well, in the mean time I will try to stay positive. I will keep applying for jobs and will continue studying and  learning web development, which at least gives me some hope. My site is still under construction and some of it has been rewritten (and actually works). http://www.StacyYoungPhotos.com

The new pages that I made are the index/Home, About Stacy and Retro 80's Arcade. The other pages were originally made using a drag and drop web builder and I will get to those soon I hope, ultimately making the whole site original while learning a lot at the same time. Right now, I feel like I have intermediate HTML knowledge, beginning CSS and just being introduced to JavaScript and J Query, I hope to be  more proficient with all of these within a month or so and even though I have so much to learn still, I'm very motivated  and excited by it. This is something I've been wanting to do for a long time and I'm finally doing something about it! This can be compared to the difference between how when someone learns to play guitar because their parents wanted  them to, verses someone learning guitar because they really want to.

I also realize more than ever how fragile life really is. The ability to just breathe, is something most of us take for granted. I sure appreciate it a lot more and now that I've damaged my lungs all these years from smoking, I realize this. Hopefully at least someone reading this will learn from my mistakes and quit smoking or never start if they don't smoke already. We only have one set of lungs in this life, so it doesn't make sense to purposely fuck them up!