posted
First, off I have a doctors appointment in morning. But I'm impatient so I'm looking for an ideas I can get before then.
I'm been sick for the past 3-4 days. It started with a sore throat, then i had a fever, chills, joint pains and a mild cough. Those symptoms are pretty much gone but now I've got sever pain in my rib cage. It starts at my breast bone and goes all the way around to my spine. I hurts when I move. It hurts when I put any pressure on my ribs. It doesn't hurt when I inhale but it hurts when I exhale completely and hurts quite badly when I cough.
When I think about it, I think the rib pain actually started before any of the other symptoms.
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posted
From my very unexperienced eyes, it seems like a normal flu/infection. That the ache came before is an interesting issue, but I think muscle pain is a common precursor to influenza/infection.
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posted
Just to clarify, the pain I'm experiencing around my ribs isn't an ache. Its a severe sharp pain when I move or cough or breath in and out deeply. And it isn't focused at on spot. Its pretty much my entire rib cage, though it does more intense on the lower part of my rib cage around my diaphram than it does up higher.
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posted
Oh, and I did have a lot of pretty typical muscle aches and pains earlier in the week. This is not at all the same.
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posted
I have heard that coughing can cause muscle tears in the chest that are quite painful. But if this started before you started coughing, I suppose that would not be it.
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posted
Well its certainly gotten much worse over the past few days so maybe it isn't the same thing that was bothering me before I got sick. But I really haven't been coughing that much. Less than I usually do with the flu. It really doesn't seem like I've coughed enough to cause this much pain.
If I sit still and don't breath, it feels like I've got a tight band around my ribs. Moving and breathing are getting progressively more painful.
posted
Well, it's a good thing you're going to the doctor tomorrow so they can rule out something like pneumothorax.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
It could be that you strained something while coughing/sneezing. I have even heard of people cracking rib that way, although those people were elderly and had bone density issues before getting sick.
posted
It sounds like it could be pleurisy to me, based on the severity of the pain.
However, if you get into any sort of respiratory distress, if your breathing becomes labored or if you feel a difficulty in catching your breath, please go to the hospital immediately. The pandemic flu is claiming many previously healthy victims now by attacking the lungs directly. See information about viral pneumonia or secondary bacterial pneumonia.
There are also some auto-immune diseases of the lung which can be life-threatening. Typically the onset of these can be precipitated by a flulike illness when the immune response against the virus mistakenly attacks the lung itself.
posted
Pleurisy is a possibility. Most of the pleuritic inflammations I've witnessed tended to come on more dramatically than that, so if it is that makes it (hopefully?) a less serious infection.
Posts: 15421 | Registered: Aug 2005
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posted
Okay, Rabbit, I had to do some digging in my email and blog to find this and realize you're likely already on your way to see the doctor or just did, but I had this develop a few years ago: costochondritis.
Does this sound anything like you're experiencing?
Sometimes it's a sharp pain (when you're exhaling) and sometimes it's a lingering pressure that makes it feel like you can't take a deep breath without risking it hurting. I ended up going to the doctor over it way back in '06 or '07 and being told to do two things: a) take some kind of anti-inflammatory and b) don't lift anything too heavy for awhile (I'd been doing a lot of box moving at work - law firm) because that would just aggrevate it.
What did you find out??
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posted
Now that Traceria mentions it, my husband had that. They had him take lots of ibuprofen. It is why he loves ibuprofen now.
Posts: 2223 | Registered: Mar 2008
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posted
Well I'm back from doctor. She thinks I've got a viral infection of the muscles in my chest. She prescribed muscle relaxants and codeine which I probably won't take.
posted
Glad it's not something worse, but that sounds like a pain to deal with.
Are the muscle relaxants and codeine combined or separate? Maybe it would help to just take the first? Or is it not the fact that codeine is a narcotic that is the issue?
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posted
They aren't combined but the muscle relaxant makes you drowsy. Maybe i'll get it and see if it help me sleep at night. I don't have any ethical problems with the fact that codeine is a narcotic, but I really don't enjoy the effects of narcotics. They make me feel stupid.
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posted
My mom reacts badly to narcotics too. I actually figured the odds of that were slightly more likely than you objecting to narcotics on principle. IIRC, bad reactions to narcotics are not uncommon.
posted
Oh I hope you feel better soon. I've never heard of having a virus in a specific muscle or group of muscles. That's interesting.
I'm also one who avoids narcotics if I possibly can. In addition to knocking me out cold, they leave me hung over for days afterward. It's usually not worth it to take them, for me, unless I've just got pain that's off-the-scale unbearable. Then they're great.
Keep us posted and if it doesn't clear up soon, maybe you could go back to the doctor again or to a different doctor. =)
Posts: 6246 | Registered: Aug 2004
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posted
I learned the hard way that just because you never heard of some medical condition, does not mean it cannot happen. I had never heard of hiatal hernias becoming strangulated. (Hiatal hernias are where the hole through which the esophagus passes through the diaphragm becomes enlarged, allowing some of the stomach to protrude into the chest. Usual symptoms are a tendency toward acid reflux.)
About six weeks ago I thought I was having a heart attack. My sister drove me to the hospital. They gave me an EKG three times, and detected no abnormalities with my heart. They may have been thinking I was imagining things, and exaggerating when I said my pain was a 10 on the 1-10 scale. Then one doctor noted that I was drenched with sweat, and another pointed out that was consistent with being in great pain. I reminded the doctors that I had mentioned I had a hiatal hernial. They put me in a small, portable MRI they had in the emergency room, and spotted the problem immediately. Much of my stomach had protruded into my chest, and become twisted and tissue was in danger of dying from strangulation cutting off circulation of blood. They rushed me into emergency surgery which saved my life.
So yes, hiatal hernias can become strangulated. The chief surgeon of the surgical team that operated on me said this was not the first time he had seen a hiatal hernia become strangulated. I was fortunate that they got to it in time. Once they pulled my stomach out of my chest and untwisted it, the tissue began to pink up again. They tightened up the passage through the diaphragm so the hiatal hernia would not reoccur.
On the plus side, I should have more breath now when I sing as church chorister or in a choir, since my lungs have more room.
Posts: 3742 | Registered: Dec 2001
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posted
Have the pleurisy ruled out. My wife has been suffering with pleurisy since she was a pre-teen, and was just diagnosed with lupus (at 36). Her doctor says that pleurisy is common in those who have/will have lupus.
Posts: 692 | Registered: Feb 2000
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Ron, for the record, I didn't mean I'd never heard of it in a doubting way. I just meant that is quite interesting and I'd never heard it before. I knew Dr. Rabbit would get that meaning.
Both I and my son have chronic intractable medical problems, and we're both currently disabled but always researching, reading, and continually trying anything that seems to hold promise. So I'm kind of trying to be an apprentice doctor after years of doing this sort of reading, and I found that new (to me) information to be intriguing.
By the way, it's really interesting to me that instead of finding too little explanation/too few diagnoses for our problems (particularly his) we actually find too many. In other words, several completely different diagnoses each seem to explain his symptoms quite well alone, and would have prompted us to quit looking for more explanation, but for the fact that my son is brilliant and keeps searching for different/better answers. (Not to brag or anything. ) We've had the experience of going to 4 or 5 different specialists who are sure his whole trouble stems from some condition of which they are the specialists. But they're so diverse that it's hard to know which of those things he has, if any, or if he has all of them at once, or what.
I'd always thought it would be a case of "nah, that doesn't fit, nothing fits". Turns out it's a case of "yeah that fits, yeah that fits too, hey this really fits as well". What do you do in that case? Is that common when diagnosing, I wonder? Or are we just unlucky in that regard?
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) We've had the experience of going to 4 or 5 different specialists who are sure his whole trouble stems from some condition of which they are the specialists. But they're so diverse that it's hard to know which of those things he has, if any, or if he has all of them at once, or what.
