Good evening. Its been a long two days; allow me to elaborate.

Yesterday at around 4pm GMT after school I started to get pretty bad chest pain and a strange "squirting" or "bubbling" feeling in my chest when ever I leant over.

As you can imagine I started to crap myself as a healthy dose of hypochondria came in to play. The symptoms for a heart attack were present: Stabbing pain in the left side of the body, dizziness and so on but I'm only sixteen and though possible this seemed quite unlikely.

I decided to apply Ockham's razor to the situation, with the conclusion that I'd pulled something very badly while sparring. It seemed fairly likely, given I'd been unable to walk from similar skateboarding injuries.

One of my friend's came in for me and I decided to head down to his and play FEAR to take my mind off it. It didn't work. On the way down the pain became such that I could almost not continue.

Later I got my (less than concerned at the time >_<) parents to drive me in to the hospital. On the way lighting blasted the dark landscape, illuminating everything in sight. By the time I got to the hospital I was analysing everything in extreme detail; my usual response to panic. I spent the X-ray calculating the equivalent dose of the X-ray in comparison to the 2 mili-seiverts considered normal for Scottish civilians.

The doctor returned and I could see before she told me from the X-ray in her hand that my left lung had collapsed rather substantially. Its referred to as a "Pneumothorax" in medicine, caused when an aperture appears in the lung lining causing a leak of gas from the lung in to the surrounding area which should remain a vacuum in terms of the lungs' gas dynamics. So when this air leaks the lung heals causing a negative vacuum outside the lung sustained by the pocket of air. Which fucking hurts.

From there I waited for hours, playing spit and go fish with people I was bored enough to engage. Eventually I was transferred through a variety of doctors and nurses who asked me the same questions and poked me with various sharp implements.

I fell asleep around 12 hours after the incident began.

In the morning I was assaulted with a selection of menus and given surprisingly tasty food. The guy in the bed across from me was really old. Most of them were.

I heard that I would be getting a needle pushed through my ribs and into the pocket of air outside my left lung to relieve the pressure, or a general anaesthetic surgery where the lung negative vaccuum is injected with an irritant, presumably to get the lung to stick back to the lining.

Throughout the day I listened in to various conversations between patients and doctors: People falling over, trying to kill themselves, getting stabbed by some junkie fuck. A guy crossed the room with nothing but a pair of shorts and only his eyes visible below tightly wrapped bandages across his face.

The old guy across from me got up several times, trying to escape. "I am going home", he would proclaim, and walk down the corridor extremely slowly only to be returned by annoyed staff. That at least kept me amused throughout the monotony of waiting for results.

In the end the attending consultants arrived with the results of my second X-ray: It was the same as the first, its hadn't worsened so I would be allowed to go home.

So here I am writing this blog. Moments ago I found that Pneumothorax can be brought on by "Barotrauma" where a change in pressure gives just the right conditions for an aperture to appear.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Barotrauma

And so concludes the time that lightning collapsed my lungs.