A 22-year-old man sneezed hard and immediately felt sharp pain on the left side of his chest, followed by breathlessness that kept getting worse. In the emergency department, he was breathing 24 times a minute, and his blood oxygen level was 80% on room air. A chest X-ray showed a massive left-sided pneumothorax: air had leaked into the space around his lung, and the lung had nearly completely collapsed.
The case, published in March in Cureus, includes a detail that shows how quietly the problem can build. The man had no known illnesses, and a routine pre-employment chest X-ray taken a year earlier had shown nothing abnormal.
