10/07/2026
I’ve been quiet for a few days because the weekend didn’t exactly go as planned and we are all recovering…. Following my son’s first day of a two day swim meet he ended up with horrible chest pain that was center/left and radiating up the left side of his neck. We are blessed to be part of a large family of doctors (I’m the black sheep - but that’s a conversation for another day) and many of us were together following the meet for brunch. They all did their best to rule things out and we tried to give it time for some ibuprofen to take effect thinking it was a musculoskeletal issue combined with a freshly chlorinated pool. After a couple hours of the pain intensifying rather than subsiding a trip to the ER was in order because he was scheduled to swim several events again the next morning and boy are we glad that we did. His heart checked out but they found a pneumothorax (where the lung pulls away from the chest wall) in his right lung along with pneumomediastinum (escaped air in the middle of the chest between the lungs and around the heart), which was causing all of the pain in the center of his chest. That landed us with a 24-hour stay on oxygen with constant monitoring to ensure that the pneumothorax closed up. The Lord was so good to us, for He sealed it up and prevented him from needing a chest tube to remove the air. Now we are trying to get comfortable in the waiting. We’re waiting for complete healing and the pain in his chest to fully resolve. We’re waiting to meet with more doctors to come up with a game plan for him to return to swimming (if that’s possible). At this point they haven’t been able to guide us because we’ve been told that he needs to avoid prolonged breath holding - hello, he’s a swimmer! So we wait and pray. It’s so often in the waiting and in the valleys when the Lord grows us the most and so we lean in through prayer asking for wisdom and discernment. We know that God works all things together for His good, so we pray for eyes to see and the ears to hear…and we trust and wait.
