An 18-year-old walked into a British emergency department with sharp pain in the center of his chest that shot up into his throat and got worse when he lay down. A CT scan showed air had escaped into the middle of his chest and spread well beyond it: up into his neck, out toward his armpits, in front of his breastbone, and along the front of the sac that surrounds his heart.
The likely trigger surfaced only after the scans. Questioned again, the young man said he had inhaled five balloons of nitrous oxide, the party drug better known as laughing gas, that afternoon. About six hours later, he arrived at the hospital with chest pain. Physicians at Medway Maritime Hospital in Gillingham, Kent, England, described the case in the Journal of Medical Case Reports in April 2025, under a title calling the drug "not a laughing matter anymore."
