Breathing works because your chest is sealed. It runs at negative pressure. That negative pressure is what pulls air in.
Trauma breaks that in one of a few ways. It can breach the seal. That's an open wound. It can fill the space with something that doesn't belong, air or blood. It can break the frame that moves the chest wall. That's flail chest. Or it can squeeze the heart sitting inside that space. That's tamponade.
Every injury in this lesson is one of those four things going wrong. That's the order we'll go in: air, then blood, then frame, then heart.
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