Sunday, September 28, 2014

pleural effusion + pneumonia

The Tuesday before we headed up north for Eric and Sunny's wedding I finally decided I needed to go to the Dr. to see why on earth I was having such a hard time breathing. I couldn't lay flat, and I had been sleeping in the recliner. Breathing was so painful, and I was already having a hard recovery. I lost it that Tuesday morning, I couldn't do it anymore. I called a friend who does x-ray's and quickly went in to get a chest x-ray. As soon as I saw my x-ray I knew something was wrong. It looked sooo bad! I called the radiologist I used to work for and asked him if I could come have him read it for me. We headed over to the clinic and he said I had pneumonia and pleural effusion of the right lung. We called and let Dr. Lunt know and he got me on a z-pack, another round of antibiotics and an inhaler. I was soo glad we went and got everything figured out before we headed up to Eric and Sunny's wedding. I would not have made it through the wedding weekend. It was kind of weird being the patient getting the x-rays, I have never actually had x-rays before but I sure have taken a lot of other people's!
 Basically what you are looking at here is a really terrible chest x-ray. On a healthy person the lung portion should be almost completely black and you should be able to see ten ribs pretty clearly. On the ride side you can make out six maybe seven ribs and it looks pretty gunky instead of being black in the lung area. There is also quite a bit of air that was trapped underneath my diaphragm after my c-section, I guess that will just go away over time!
Ah! My lungs are so gunky!

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