[Kyle]

Its great to hear that you are doing OK , and that you should be up and around for build or at least comp season.

For anyone that wants to know a pneumothorax is a medical term for a collection or air or some other type of gas in the chest wall that forces the lung to collapse that is not caused by a trauma to the chest. A majority of pneumothoraxs occur when someone is at rest or doing something non labor intensive. When one occurs the person experiencing it, tell me if I am right or wrong Jacob, they would feel chest pain with shortness of breath/difficulty breathing and depending on the persons pain tolerance the pain could be very sharp stabbing or dull. They occur very suddenly. Symptoms for someone to watch out for if they see someone experiencing the chest pain/difficulty breathing, other then a possible heart attack/Angina, are a very rapid respiratory rate due to the body only having one lung and abnormal breathing such as someone leaning over holding their ribs and very little motion in the chest when breathing, or even one side moving and the other not.

Here are the statistics from my Anatomy and Physiology class:

"Spontaneous pneumothorax is seven times more likely to occur in males than females. Male smokers have 22 times the rate of spontaneous pneumothorax compared to nonsmoking males. Female smokers have a 9 times increase in the rate of a spontaneous pneumothorax compared to nonsmoking females . A spontaneous pneumothorax is most likely to occur during the fall or winter months"

If you want to know some of the possible causes of spontaneous pneumothoraxs they are over something like 60% of the time caused by the rupture of this little tiny air or fluid sac in the lung called bleb or bullae, when they rupture the air is let out of the lung into the pleura space between the chest wall and the lung. Other causes of spontaneous pneumothorax are known lung disease's such was chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, COPD. Also pneumonia, lung cancer asthma cystic fibrosis and tuberculosis.




Once someone is taken to the hospital usually the ER first, the treatment can be anything as a wait and see approach because some small pneumothorax can clear up on their own and the excess air is just absorbed into the blood stream. Other times a chest tube is placed into the pluria place between the lung and outer chest where the air or fluid is trapped to release the pressure and re inflate the lung and most of the time the tube is then removed unless needed for drainage purposes and also there is a surgical procedure if needed.



Pneumothorax occur mostly in tall skinny males between late teens to 40 years old and there are somewhere near 10,000 cases a year in the United States from the 2006 records from the American Lung Association in my text book



If you have or ever have or had a pneumothorax sadly you can no go SCUBA diving due to the increased pressure on the chest wall, mountain climbing in high elevations or flying in unpressurized planes.



Hope that helps answer questions, pneumothoraxs are something I get to see at work sometimes but very rarely are they spontaneous type, usually we see them due to trauma, car accident, stabbing or shooting and can also be from blast injuries.