A Bleb is a blister. i know. i had one in my right lung, down low where it was hard to get at. And for fifty some years it was fine. And then one day it popped.
My right lung slowly collapsed. I felt incredible pressure on my chest. I had a hard time getting enough air at work. I thought i was having a heart attack, which as Borgo can tell you is a thing to be avoided if at all possible.
Of course when I went into the hospital, the first thing they did was hook up an EKG. Normal. So an experienced doctor came in and listened to my chest. About fifteen minutes later they brought in an x-ray machine to take pictures of my chest. About forty minutes later they sent in two surgical interns and a cute nurse. The interns were there to insert a chest tube. The nurse was there to hold my hand.
So as they cut into my chest to push in the tube i recited the famed Monty Python sketch from Monty Python and the Holy Grail Bring Out Your Dead. And they laughed, but they also asked me how long I'd been a smoker. You see the two most comon reason for a bleb in the lungs. The first is that a bit of lung does not completely develop in the womb. In young men that bleb usually pops when they're in their late teens or early twenties, in other words the time when men are most likely to do stupid shit. The other reason is smoking. Until my later surgery they had a really hard time buying it when i told them "I smoked pot in college. Okay for a few years afterward.
The end result of my bleb was lying a table prepping for surgery to have a chunk of lung removed with the surgeon telling me "this is probably the most painful surgery we do." He wasn't wrong, the night after my surgery i didn't sleep a wink. I would have confessed to designing the Pontiac Aztek. And i was on the good drugs.
i will never forget my bleb. I have some very, very long scars to remind me of it and some soreness four years later from when they forced my ribs apart to get to it. I will never forgive my bleb. And if you play Scrabble, it's a very handy word to know.