A freshman’s fight: Leigh Rechin

Leigh Rechin must feel like she has nine lives. You would too if you survived your lung collapsing three times in one semester. She still worries that it may happen again.

“After my surgery, for the first couple of months I was worried sick, but as time went on I still worry but less than before,” Leigh said. “I guess I just don’t want to miss out on having kids and a marriage, all the things that I have always wanted.”

Hannah Delansky, Leigh’s roommate and best friend since age two, often worries about her.

“This may sound funny but sometimes I’ll wake up in the middle of the night and make sure she is still breathing,” Delansky said. “I just don’t know what I would do without her. I was a wreck throughout all of this.”

A collapsed lung occurs when air fills the pleural cavity, which is the space between your lung and chest wall.

Without the support from her hall mates, Delansky says she does not know how she would have made it.

“They helped out a lot. I was not sleeping well, so we had a big slumber party to calm my nerves,” she said. “We were all so worried about her. I just felt like it was happening to me. I’m just glad she is okay.”

Leigh recently sat in Panera Bread in Lockport with her hair in a bun and feet in the chair, nervously changing the positions of her feet as she retold her story.

“I was sitting in my room doing my homework when I felt this scary, weird pain in my chest,” she said. Rechin said her roommate Hannah “told me that I probably had gas and said I should try to sleep it off. But when I still felt it the next day, I decided to go to Lograsso. They rushed me to the hospital.”

 Leigh is a freshman childhood and early childhood education major with a concentration in earth science. She is in the honors program and has received many awards. In high school she was in the National Honor Society and received numerous scholarships.

There are a lot of things that Leigh wants to do in her time here at Fredonia. “I would love to study abroad in Australia and volunteer in any way that I can,” she said.

Anne Rechin, Leigh’s mother, was not at all prepared for her daughter’s sudden lung collapse.

“We are a very close family; when she is not at school we do a lot together,” Anne said. “So when we first heard, tears came and the fear of losing her set in. I wasn’t sure what it all meant.”

Growing up, Leigh loved to be outside, camping with her parents and attending swimming lessons and doing things she still loves to do today like tubing, snowmobiling and boating. Leigh loves to volunteer at daycare centers. “Anything with kids really,” she said. In her free time, she loves to hang out with her hall mates and play cards.

Leigh is worried about tubing for the first time since her surgery. “I’m nervous, but I love the water. Always have and I always will,” she said.

Each time her lung collapsed, she had to have a chest tube inserted into her body which would drain fluid from her lungs. On one occasion when the doctors took the tube out, her lung deflated and they had to reinsert it, prolonging the length of her hospital stay.

“Every time Leigh’s lung collapsed she had a 100 percent oxygen level and her heart rate and blood pressure were normal. The doctors could not figure out why,” Anne said. Leigh’s lung collapses were declared spontaneous.

The second instance was during Thanksgiving break. “I ate my food first, believe it or not. After I was full I told my parents and they took me to the Millard Fillmore Hospital,” she said.

“What a lot of people do not know is that each time your lung collapses the chance of it occurring again is 30 percent,” Anne said.

When Leigh’s lung collapsed for the third time on Dec. 3, she had to have surgery to ensure that it would not happen again. Leigh stayed in the intensive care unit the night after her operation. The last hospital stay for her was the longest; she stayed about a week mainly because of the severity of the surgery.

“This may sound funny and you may not believe me, but I was never scared I was going to die,” Leigh said. “Don’t get me wrong, the first time it happened I was crying and scared because I did not know what was happening to me. After the first time, I knew what it was. I would just say ‘oh, my lung again. Great time to go to the hospital.’”