The story so far.. September 2010

It's September, I'm at work and feeling pretty breathless and I have a pain in my shoulder which feels too much like when my lung collapsed a couple of years back. I'm five months pregnant though and working on the chainsaw all day so I figure it's just a mixture of hard graft and my uterus pushing on my diaphragm. I decide it's time to stop felling tree's till after the baby is born and start taking it easy at work. 

The pain and discomfort doesn't really go away. I'm pretty sure my lung has collapsed which is strange because I had a pleurodesis two years ago after a series of spontaneous pneumothorax. The next day I go to the hospital and get a chest x-ray, the doctor comes back and says "The good new is your lung hasn't collapsed but there is something in there." "Something more sinister?" I ask and he smiles and says it's probably just some scar tissue or fluid from my operation. So I have an appointment to see the lung specialist who says she hasn't seen anything like it before, but is reluctant to give me a biopsy because i'm pregnant so she opts for an MRI. I make the stupid mistake of searching for "shadow in lung post pleurodesis" on google and read a story of a man who's talc pleurodesis caused cancer in his pleural space and he died four months later. My head is all over the place now and I'm getting upset. From the MRI she says she is "99.9% sure it's benign" So i've just to see how I get on with my pregnancy and we will deal with it afterwards. Phew!!

A week later I wake in the middle of the night in quite severe pain and each breath inward causes a sharp pain across my shoulder. I pace my room telling my boyfriend "something is really wrong." The next morning I call the lung specialist and she says if it's not worse than it's been before then I should grin and bare it as they'll just give me another x ray which isn't good for the baby. I struggle to decide whether the pain is worse than before or not and in the end I stay at home.