A 72-year-old man arrived at a small emergency department with three complaints. He was short of breath, his face was swollen, and his scrotum was whistling.
The whistle turned out to be the least dangerous part of the story. A chest X-ray showed that both of his lungs had collapsed, that air had leaked into the center of his chest, and that air had spread beneath his skin. Doctors could feel it crackling from his head to his thighs. Some of it was escaping through a wound in his scrotum that had never healed after a procedure five months earlier.
