Busting a lung but without the laughter

Holy shit, I thought things were wild before... My expectations have been grandly upstaged!

A summary of how I'd been doing lately: honestly not too great but been trying to hang in there. Even on the couple days I reserved for myself to just relax, I still had a load of anxiety and continued to feel overwhelmingly stressed. Actually I had a very gratifying annual review at work this week and was given a raise that puts me at double (!) what I earned when I started here 3.5 years ago, and that's HUGE—yet I simply didn't have it in me to feel happy about it. And it's been busy wrapping everything up so that I could leave for my week-long intense business trip to DC...

This morning, I was supposed to board a plane to Washington DC. I...I'm in the hospital.

Yesterday was my day off that I planned to spend doing nothing but chilling and packing. I stayed in bed til the afternoon just watching Marvel and DC analysis videos, and when I finally hopped out of bed, I suddenly had a bit of trouble breathing? I just went on with my day of lounging around (and rewatched Civil War SUCH A GOOD MOVIE) and hoped that the discomfort would go away like other discomforts that I just leave alone. Because I'd also been belching nonstop, Chiisa looked up my symptoms and found that my acid reflux could have caused shortness of breath if stomach acid leaked into my lungs, so I took the maximum allowed dose of acid reducer and hoped that would do it.... But when it became 10 PM and I was only feeling worse, I realized that this might not go away in the morning. @_@ How would my body react to being on a plane if I was struggling just to breathe at ground level..? How disgusting would I have been if I belched constantly on a plane? What would I have done if I got worse on this trip, the majority of which was to be spent alone editing in my hotel room?

My dad was hesitant at first but I persuaded him to take me to the emergency room to get checked out just in case. I was thinking maybe they could prescribe me something better for my acid reflux or something. And worst case scenario, I could try to delay my flight by a day or two since I could have tried to play catch-up and start editing after a couple days of footage for the video to be shown on the final day of the week.

After taking an x-ray, it turned out...that my right lung had collapsed....... I must've sounded so stupid, not entirely registering the situation and being like, "So... I'm not getting on that plane tomorrow, huh? Oh, I shouldn't go on this trip at all?" o<-< I've never really had a surgery or been hospitalized before, so this was all new and unexpected to me... They told me that I absolutely should not have gotten on a plane in this state so I'm feeling fortunate. Within an hour or two, I was in surgery, which I was impressed by haha. They installed a tube that drains excess air so that my lung can re-expand and boy do I look awful LOL! Thankfully I can breathe fairly normally now, but there's pain and everything is difficult to do haha. I'm here for a few days until they determine it's fine to remove all this stuff—including what I've been personally referring to as my arc reactor—from my body.

As for the cause, apparently it isn't uncommon for tall and slender folks to have a spontaneous lung collapse for no good reason because of the way our body types are built. So it probably happened because of the way I hopped out of bed?

It was also babbie's first time being sedated and bruh that was trippy as hell. I kept wishing that I had been knocked out further because I'm pretty sure I was still hearing a lot of what was happening and those words would morph into part of a twisted, nonsensical song that my mind concocted while being convinced that I was on some sort of violent spinning ride. I came to consciousness before the procedure was over and while I couldn't feel any pain or fully open my eyes, I hated that I knew what was going on and kept worrying that it wasn't going well. ;n;

But now I'm doing fine!!! I had quite a bit of anxiety and high blood pressure before this but I've been able to completely chill out and I'm not really worried. ;v; I also had a lot of guilt over having to pull out literally hours before the flight and putting tons of pressure on my boss to find another editor who'd agree to this crazy week-long task last minute and re-figure out details with them. Luckily they got a good replacement and everyone from work has been wonderfully supportive—they even sent me balloons QAQ! It feels like life finally grabbed itself out of my hands and gave me a loud and clear sign to put a good halt to my stressed, anxious workaholic state. I'm holding up great!