On Thursday evening, Ronan, my autistic 15 year old son, told me that his shoulder and chest hurt. He motioned to said shoulder and chest, and closed his eyes dramatically in the *I am in pain* fashion. I asked him what had happened: was he in any kind of collision? Did he get hurt in PE? Anything at all?

He shook his head in the negative, and said, “It just… started hurting. I was walking down the hall to Ruby’s classroom and all of a sudden, it hurt.”

I thought that sounded strange, and sometimes Ronan is a little intense (read: dramatic) about pain, but I asked him to show me where he was hurting. He pointed to the divot between his shoulder muscle and his collar bone, and then wrapped his hand around to the back of his shoulder blade. Then he ran his hand down the outside of his chest. He said, “All of these places hurt.”

So I gave him a thorough ‘mom exam’. Asked him if it hurt when he breathed deeply in (it did), if it hurt when he moved his arm through his whole range of motion (it did not.). I pushed on every part of his exposed muscled that I could, and none of that hurt at all. I had him squeeze my fingers (he could, well), and asked if it hurt when he shrugged his shoulders (it really, really did.)

I didn’t think it was an injury. It really felt to me like it was something with his ribs or lungs, but it also didn’t feel ominous. I asked him if he felt like he could take some Advil for the pain and go to sleep and see how he felt in the morning? “If it still hurts like this, we’ll go in and get it checked out.” He nodded, and went to bed.

The next morning, I woke him up and asked him how he was feeling. He said it was definitely worse. 4/10 pain all the time, but 7/10 pain when moving. He also told me, very concernedly, “When I bend over, I feel like fluid runs up my chest on the inside.” That was weird as fuck, but didn’t immediately strike me as something dangerous, however it definitely didn’t sound normal.

I still didn’t want to overreact - if it was just a pulled muscle, it didn’t seem like it would be worth the expense of a trip to urgent care. I called our primary provider to see if they could get him in today, but there were no visits open. Brock and I talked it over, and he suggested that Ronan just try to push through the day, but something about Ronan’s face just hit me a certain way. I didn’t feel good about making him go to school.

I decided to drop the other kids off, and then just go to the urgent care near the school. Just in case. Just to be safe. That way, if there was nothing wrong, I could swing him back by the school for the rest of the day and we’d both have some peace of mind.

We walked in right when they opened and were the first ones in line. I told them his symptoms and they took us back immediately. The first thing that they did was an EKG to make sure it wasn’t his heart. Within 5 minutes of the EKG, the provider came back into the room and said that he didn’t want to worry us, but just for safety and desiring a more experienced set of eyes on Ronan, they were sending us to the children’s hospital down town.

Of course, in that moment I was immensely, immediately worried. All of the “big-bad” possible reasons started running through my mind. Was he having a heart attack? Some sort of weird infection? The human brain is a master of “worst case scenario”, and I immediately ran to most of them. My body felt tense and tight, hot and chilled at the same time. I was scared and trying my damndest to stay calm.

We got in the car to head to the hospital, and on the way there, I asked Ronan, “Are you worried?”

“Yeah,” he said, a little subdued. He had his right hand resting on his left chest wall, and was breathing shallowly. He looked wan, and drawn, and concerned. “I guess I don’t know how worried I should be.”

I explained to him that the whole point of going to the hospital was not BECAUSE something was super wrong, but just to rule out the big bad things. I reminded him (and myself) that it was still possible that everything was going to be okay, and we were just doing the safe thing. I tried to walk him through everything he could possibly expect - the triage, and the gown, and then the monitoring, that he would probably get an IV. I expected that they would want to do a chest x-ray and probably a round of blood work. I also told him that EVERYONE we met would ask us to tell the same story over and over again - that’s just how the hospital works.

And… that’s exactly how it went. Triage. Gown. Monitors. X-ray. IV for blood work. And despite having to tell the story over and over again, every single person that we met was wonderful. Kind, friendly, helpful - we were in the pediatric emergency room, and everyone was brilliant.

On the drive from the clinic, I had texted Brock and asked him to meet us at the hospital, but once we were there, it was just a lot of “hurry up and wait”. Urgent patience. Most of the time in the hospital is spent waiting for results. Despite having nothing new to offer us, someone came into our room every 15 minutes or so and asked us what was going on and how we were doing and if we needed anything.

Ronan was… brilliant. He was calm, and patient. He followed directions. He asked excellent questions. Every time someone came into the room, they asked him, “Can you tell me your name and your date of birth?” By the 10th time someone asked him that, he responded and then said, “Why does everyone do that? Are you checking for amnesia?”

Despite all of the worry and possible problems, Ronan was such a pleasure.

Brock finally showed up and stepped into the ER room with us. We made eye contact and both immediately started crying. Not just because something hard and scary was happening to our biggest boy, but because we were back in the hospital where our smallest boy had died 8 years ago. It was heavy and emotional, and hard to be there.

Once Brock arrived, we didn’t have to wait much longer for the results - his chest x-ray showed that he had a small pneumothorax - a mild collapsed lung. The doctor that came in to tell us was young, and tall, and pleasant. She said, “He’s basically a textbook case of a condition called ‘spontaneous pneumothorax’ - young, tall, thin, athletic white males just… get them. There isn’t really a known cause.”

Brock and I both welled up with emotion - it felt pretty intense for our young teenage son to have a collapsed lung - but we were grateful that there didn’t seem to be anything more ominous or dangerous going on. “However,” she went on, “Ronan also had a positive result in one of his labs called a d-dimer that is sometimes elevated with blood clots.” Because of my stroke history, they wanted to do a special type of CT scan to make sure he didn’t also have any blood clots in his lungs. That took another 15 or 20 minutes, and came back normal (no blood clots!).

Adorably, upon understanding the reason for and source of his pain, Ronan remarked, “I guess I should have known that it was air bubbles running up my chest when I bent over… not water.” I laughed in delight. “Ronan,” I told him, “There was no possible way for you to know that! Frankly, I’m amazed that you recognized and verbalized that sensation at all.”

They wanted us to speak to the surgical team before telling us the plan - it was possible that they would recommend surgery for the collapsed lung, so we waited around for that. And waited. And waited. And waited. Thankfully, we live in 2025, and we all have phones connected to the entire knowledge and entertainment database of the entire world, so it wasn’t really that terrible. A little hungry, a little thirsty, a little stir-crazy, but not terrible.

By 2pm, we were really ready to get out of the hospital, and finally the surgical team came in. They explained that his pneumothorax was probably small enough that his body would resolve it on its own, and that we would just need to follow up with x-rays to make sure that it got smaller instead of bigger. A few minutes later, someone took out his IV, and we were okay to go. The relief was immense.

Even though it was a long, grueling day of doing nothing but dealing with emotions, fears, inner turmoil, and waiting… it also was not bad. Everyone was very nice. We were treated well. The result was weird and unexpected, but nothing terribly dangerous nor ominous (or the big-big-bad we let ourselves imagine for a little while.)

And despite the yuck, we are home and resting and comfortable and grateful for all of the things: that Ronan is okay, that we received excellent care, and that we get to do it all again tomorrow. Every day we are here, and still breathing… that is a good day.

(Posted with Ronan’s explicit permission.)