My Evening in Urgent Care

What do I like to do after an 8-4 shift? Spending my entire evening in urgent care isn't on the list, but that's what I did. Here's the back story:

Thursday afternoon, I started having slight pain in my right lung. I figured my asthma was acting up so I used my inhaler, but it did nothing. As the afternoon and evening progressed, it got worse. Bad enough for me to call the doctor on call to see if I should head to the ER. He said that if I was having ANY trouble breathing, I should go to the hospital. Yes, it hurt if I breathed in or out and any time I coughed (which I needed to do quite often). But I was exhausted and didn't want to spend six hours in an ER in the middle of the night. So I took some Tylenol PM and went to bed. Yesterday, it wasn't so bad, so I figured I'd just pulled a muscle or something. Then today came...I went through most of my shift feeling fine up until 2:30. I kept having to stop and use my inhaler (which continued to do nothing) and it was getting difficult to talk. My chest was in so much pain, I requested to leave work a little early (just 15 minutes) so I could head to urgent care.

After much waiting, I was seen. The doctor thought it didn't sound like asthma because I wasn't wheezing. So he ordered chest x-rays and a white blood cell count. No pneumonia. After having me describe in much detail how the pain felt and point out exactly where I could feel it, he determined that everything points to the possibility of a small blood clot in my lung. So he ordered more blood work that will determine something (though I don't remember what) and will call with those results in the morning. I don't know what happens if the blood test comes back positive. In the meantime, I am not supposed to go to work tomorrow so I can rest and I was given a nice prescription for oxycontin to help deal with the nasty chest pain.

The thought of a blood clot is scary and not knowing why my lung hurts so badly is scary. I hope that it's something simple and we can get it figured out very soon. I will update when I know more.