So it turns out, you can actually get your lungs professionally washed out. It’s apparently done only for one particular medical condition (pulmonary alveolar proteinosis), and the process sounds fairly terrifying… but the end result seems to be that if your lungs are full of gunk, you can get ’em sparkly clean. A procedure that, painful and fear-filled as it sounds, I probably would have agreed to a week or two back.

Virginia Man Struggling to Breathe Gets Lungs ‘Washed’

In “lung lavage,” one lung at a time is repeatedly flushed with a saline fluid. A whole raft of medical professionals is on hand, including anesthesiologists, to make sure it doesn’t go too wrong and to pound on the patients chest during the process to make sure the fluid goes everywhere. The other lung is left “dry” during the process so the patient can still breath. For those in a *really* bad way, though, I bet that’s pretty harsh… barely able to breath at the beginning, one of their lungs is taken out of the system. When the first lung is washed, the system is flipped and the second is washed, all in one hours-long procedure.

I suspect the patient is kept fully aware and conscious during this, so he/she gets to feel every last second of drowning. But I wonder: could they super-oxygenate the saline? Like the breathing fluid in “The Abyss,” if there’s enough oxygen in the fluid, maybe even the lung getting washed would contribute to blood oxygenation.

Another question I have is how they prevent pneumonia. If you wash out the lungs, you leave them nice and clean… meaning no mucous coating, either. Seems the perfect breeding ground for bacterial nasty. But apparently they have that worked out.

The article says this procedure is done only for PAP. But as experience builds, I wonder if it’ll become an option for other treatments… pneumonia, bronchitis, emphysema all seem like they might benefit from lung-wash.