The importance of breathing

The importance of breathing cannot be overstated. If you are not breathing right now, I highly recommend you do something about it immediately. In other words, don't be like me and wait a week.

Last Saturday it struck like a bolt out of the blue -- a sharp pain behind the left shoulder blade that got worse when I tried to draw in air. It did cross my mind that it might be something serious, but, despite the pain, I didn't feel short of breath or weak, I wasn't turning blue, I wasn't light-headed... Mostly, I felt fine. Probably just a strained muscle.

But it only got a little bit better over the course of the week, and it worried me that I couldn't remember doing anything that might have caused the pain. So yesterday, I saw the doctor. And he told me to go to the hospital right away. I got a CT scan of the chest and waited at the hospital for the results to come back. The scan revealed a pneumothorax, commonly known as a collapsed lung. It's the kind of diagnosis that makes you think: I'm lucky I'm still here. Fortunately, I still had one good lung left; redundancy in design can be a beautiful thing.

Here are some things I did on my one good lung: I sat in an unheated sanctuary for a couple of hours. I painted over racist graffiti. I carried a heavy load of groceries one block and then up three flights of stairs. I put in four full days at the office. Some of these things might be worthy of a man's last breath, but I, for one, would rather go on breathing.