One of the first things I remember the paramedics telling me as four liters of blood gushed into my chest cavity (which was then repeated by doctors and nurses nonstop over the coming months,) was how common it is to see someone of my size and build have a lung collapse on them with barely any outside encouragement. Are you maybe picturing me to be heavily overweight, so there was a lot of inertia slamming me into the luxurious, gentle embrace of those soft cushions? Or maybe you've gone the other way, and you're imagining that I am frail and feeble, with bones made from sawdust and hope?
Nope. I was in trim shape thanks to all the full-contact boxing I was doing at the time, and stand tall at a lofty 6'4. These are major red flags for getting what is called a pneumothorax, or its more hardcore blood cousin, the haemothorax, which was the one I got after losing a dust-up with a couch. At least I got the rad one.
"We see it all the time" is a phrase I heard a lot, which is weird, because I had been the same height and roughly the same weight for almost ten years by that stage. So why in the raging fuck did no one at any point think to mention it in a decade of doctor's appointments? What other seemingly arbitrary things are out there that will try to kill you for no reason at all? Do folk in the northern hemisphere have a predisposition for their hearts to explode if they see too much of the color blue? Can sponges kill redheads? Who knows?!
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