Near Fatal Outcome in a 70-Year-Old Male Complaining of Orthopnea: A Case Report

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

Orthopnea and progressive hypoxemia are common complaints in the older aged patients. When these symptoms don’t seem to stem from a benign cause, there becomes a cause for concern of a severe underlying condition. First line interventions are then deployed and the hope is that they could resolve the matter with lesser invasive means. When the patient begins to have hemodynamic instability, this then calls for emergency intervention with a potential hospitalization. A patient could then be subject to numerous diagnostic tests and therapies in order to resolve the underlying condition. We present the case of a patient who was having progressively worsening orthopnea and likely would have died of acute respiratory failure due to idiopathic pulmonary fibrosis.