Learning to Breathe

 May 23, 2025

I never thought that something as simple as taking a breath would be a struggle, until the day my lung collapsed.

Over the years, it seemed like I outgrew my swaddling medical history. I grew taller, stronger, and more active. Running became a passion, and I joined my high school’s track and field and cross-country teams. Running with every breath filling my lungs, I gradually forgot what it meant to struggle to breathe. By the time I entered university, the sickly child I once was had faded into a distant memory. Each mile I ran empowered me, building confidence.

Yet, even as I grew stronger and more confident, a quiet part of me never fully forgot what it felt like to be vulnerable. The body remembers even when the mind tries to forget, and mine was about to remind me in a way I’d never anticipated.

An Old Friend

It was autumn again, 2024, but this time on a clear day on the other side of the globe. Stepping out of the car, a sudden, sharp pain spread through the left side of my chest. Every breath intensified the pain, but I shrugged it off as a muscle cramp and went to shower. The mist of the shower and the growing pain made me return to a strange yet familiar routine of gasping for air. By evening, exhaustion took over, and I hoped sleep would heal my discomfort.

It didn’t.

I was awoken in the morning to the unnerving sound of my own heartbeat, as if someone was knocking on the door. The feeling was ever so familiar, a nostalgia of coughing and gasping that little by little took my breath away again.

Within hours, I was back in the familiar world of hospital rooms and medical interventions. A spontaneous pneumothorax, which meant my lung had collapsed, air escaping where it shouldn’t, leaving me gasping for breath. I was in bed with a tube in my chest straight into my lungs, pumping out both blood and air. 30% of my left lung had collapsed, likely caused by previous scar tissue left over from my three previous trials with pneumonia.

The doctors explained I would need a pleurectomy and a wedge resection to prevent another collapse, which meant going into my lungs and removing the potential blisters on my lungs and irritating my lungs to allow it to reattach to my chest wall.

As I was wheeled into surgery, staring at ceiling tiles rushing by, I was acutely aware of my vulnerability. Before this moment, I’d always taken my health for granted, believing I could endlessly push my body. Before this moment, I had always assumed my body would bounce back, that I could push it harder, run farther, study longer. But now, I was a patient. No amount of mental discipline or ambition could change the fact that a third of my lung had caved in and that I was about to be cut open to prevent it from happening again.

As the surgical team prepared the anesthesia, one of the nurses told me gently, “Try going to your happy place.” Instead, I was still thinking about the medical school exam; I’d been studying for it every day that summer. The reality is, I’ve always wanted to be a pediatric pulmonologist. Ever since those early episodes as a kid, I knew there had to be a better way to make sure children didn’t grow up thinking gasping for air was normal. I work with a research team studying pneumonia in children at increased risk of severe illness. Our project focused on understanding how well vaccines protected vulnerable children who, like me, once gasped for air and waited too long for relief. I spent hours processing samples, analyzing data, and contributing to a manuscript we hope will guide better prevention for families.