jackpot city casino He Was Riding His Mower When Suddenly He Couldn’t Breathe
Cars sped past the 51-year-old man as he trundled along the grass-flanked highway outside Peekskill, N.Y., on his industrial-size riding tractor-mower. The early-summer sun beat down, and sweat stung his eyes. The air was dense with fragments of cut grass that dotted his clothes and face. Suddenly he couldn’t breathe. There was just no room in his chest for a new breath, because the old air wouldn’t come out. Panic seized him. He tightened the muscles in his stomach and chest to carefully push the used air out. He felt as if he were blowing through a narrow, crimped straw. Too much pressure only made it worse. He had allergies and bad asthma and worried that something he’d mowed was triggering everything. He forced himself to breathe slowly and struggled to calm his racing heart.
“Something bad happened,” he told his wife when he reached her on his phone. She could hear the suppressed fear in his voice. “Did you use your inhaler?” she asked, her voice deliberately calm. In his panic, he hadn’t. He did now, but it didn’t do much, and he struggled to get the mower back to the storage facility. As soon as he got home, he called his pulmonologist. It was probably his asthma, the doctor told him in his office the next day and started him on a five-day course of prednisone and an antibiotic. When that didn’t help, he tried another round. When that failed, the man decided to look for answers beyond his allergies and asthma. He had these problems his entire life but never felt like this before. This, he knew, was different.
Whistle on the ExhaleHe saw his primary-care doctor. Although he still felt short of breath, the man’s oxygen level was normal. He wasn’t wheezing, so it wasn’t his asthma. Was it his heart? He was at an age when the risk of heart disease begins to climb. And esophageal spasm, from reflux, can cause a feeling of chest tightness often mistaken for a heart attack. But the endoscopy to check for spasm was normal. Not reflux. His new cardiologist ordered an EKG, an echocardiogram and a stress test. Normal, normal, normal. When the cardiologist called to tell the patient the results, he asked if he had ever seen an ear, nose and throat specialist.
It was mid-December by the time he got in to see an E.N.T. in Poughkeepsie. Hearing the man’s story, the doctor asked him to exhale forcefully. The air whistled as it came out. “I’d like to look at your airway,” the doctor told him. The patient agreed and the E.N.T. placed a slender tube into his throat, then watched the images as the scope advanced. The doctor didn’t reveal a diagnosis but recommended he see a surgeon who specialized in disorders of the trachea.
Advertisement
SKIP ADVERTISEMENTThe patient drove to Lenox Hill Hospital in New York City in mid-February to meet Dr. Matthew Inra, a thoracic surgeon who specialized in the treatment of diseases of the lungs and trachea. Inra explained to the man that the E.N.T. was looking for some kind of mass in his trachea, a cancer perhaps, that was blocking his airways, giving him this sense of constricted breathing. That doctor was able to see as far as the vocal cords, which separate the mouth and throat from the trachea. Although he couldn’t really see the windpipe, he suspected there was some kind of obstruction farther down.
Follow The New York TimesFind us on Instagram for the best of our visual journalism and beyond.Join our WhatsApp Channel for breaking news, games, recipes and more.Connect with us on Facebook to get the best of The Times, right in your feed.Inra asked the patient to breathe in and out as hard as he could. The breath in was normal; the breath out had a sustained musical tone — like a whistle. The trachea is a rigid tube, kept open and stable by C-shaped rings of cartilage stacked one on top of another. Normally, breath moves smoothly and quietly through this tube. A fixed obstruction would disrupt air flow and cause a noise when the air moved either way. But this patient only made noise when he breathed out, suggesting an intermittent obstruction. Inra suspected that the patient might have tracheobronchomalacia — a weakness in the cartilage that allows the trachea to move or even collapse with heavy breathing.
Subscribe to The Times to read as many articles as you like.jackpot city casino