A 21-year-old man walked into a Pennsylvania emergency department with sharp pain low on the right side of his belly, the textbook location for appendicitis. He did not complain of chest pain or shortness of breath. Yet the CT scan ordered to check his abdomen found something else entirely: a large collapsed right lung.
The case, published April 29, 2026, in Clinical Practice and Cases in Emergency Medicine, was written by emergency physicians Timothy Crowe, DO, and Patrick Cheatle, MD, of St. Luke's Hospital in Bethlehem, Pennsylvania. Their message for fellow clinicians is simple: a problem in the chest can show up looking like a problem in the abdomen.
