Pleurisy

[Jlsw92]

Hello l I had pluerisy in late Jan early Feb for about 3 weeks and it was absolutely awful. My chest and shoulders were so painful I had to sit with a hot water bottle between my shoulder blades most the day. Then as that started to clear I got a strain of flu.

It's now the end of March and I still get random stabbing between my collarbone shoulder area on my right side and a really tight sore chest randomly or when i over do it or get stressed it goes tight and stitch like pain, can take hours to go away sometimes.

I went to bed last night with the shoulder pain and woke up with chest pain. My ribs feel sore and so does my back.

All the pain is in the same areas as the pain when I had pleurisy but not as severe.

Anyone else had lingering pain?

My pleurisy has definitely cleared up as I was at gp late Feb and my chest was clear but that's when I was diagnosed with flu

Many thanks

[micktheknife]

Hi,

What do you use for pain relief? I've read that people with inflammatory lung disease shouldn't use Ibuprofen a lot so I use co-codamol for muscular and internal pain.

People often think "it's just the flu" but don't forget the flu virus kills between 12000-56000 people in the US every year, most of them with a lung or other underlying condition.

Look after yourself, give yourself time to recover and make sure if you have any concerns, go back to your GP.

[Hidden]

Flu can leave you with a secondary bacterial infection so maybe you need to get your GP to listen again. Also, pleurisy takes ages for the pleural membranes to settle down and stop sticking to each other when you breathe. The pain can last for ages. I had a pleural pneumonia and empyema in 2015 and I still get a pain which catches me if I breathe in deeply suddenly. Particularly if I am lying down. I take 2 panadol extra dispersible tablets if I have bad pain in my chest. As a lifeling bronchiectasis patient I don’t get pain often but when I do it is rotten. Be good to yourself and it should feel better eventually.

[JPS50]

I made my first post on my condition today (hope I posted correctly). I don't have answers for you but as I posted, I have a similar experience to you. I was diagnosed with pleurisy but with not cause figured out. I continue to have recurrences of pain, like you, and like you, they are not as bad as the first time, but they are definitely painful at worst and uncomfortable/disconcerting at best. I get recurrences when I "over do it". But that I mean, running around packing for a trip, traveling through airports on a day of travel, things like that. Not super vigorous exercise. Although, before the first recurrence I did a 30 mile bike ride in the southern US (hot) where I didn't go all out, but worked pretty hard. 24 hours later the pain came back with a vengeance.