Smoke

Last week I was diagnosed with COPD, which stands for Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Last week I had an incident. Some sort of trigger set it off. In this case it was probably a bacterial infection.

COPD is almost always related to smoking. Other types of fume inhalation may cause it, but most of the time it comes from smoking. Did I smoke? Yes, definitely.

You could say I began smoking the day the sperm livened the egg. I was conceived in 1948 and my mother was a smoker…and a drinker. And no one knew in those days that smoking and drinking caused in-the-uterus damage. Mother was exactly 40 when she became pregnant with me, which adds another health risk. I was dreadfully premature and had to be kept at the hospital for a while before coming home.

Dad smoked too. I cannot say how much my parents smoked, but it was considerable. Several packs a day, I would guess. So premature and exposed to cigarette smoke and alcohol whilst in utero, I came home to a household full of second hand smoke. Who knew?

Really, literally, in those benighted days just after World War II, no one thought much about exposure to smoke. As a child, it seemed like everyone smoked. I know almost everyone in my family did.

In 1959 we moved from Houston, Texas to Stockton, California. It was in the summertime, and we ran the air conditioner in our brand new second hand Ford station wagon all the way. I was ten and had been fortified with boxes full of comic books to read. I remember sitting in the backseat. My parents sat up front taking turns driving. And they smoked. And they smoked. And they smoked! My eyes would almost swell shut from the pain of all of that smoke. I complained and they would roll down the windows for a while, but we were crossing New Mexico, Arizona, and the high desert of Eastern California. It was hot.

There might have been interstate then, but I mainly remember two lane roads where traffic would back up on hills. We had a burlap water bag in case the car overheated. It had a rope handle that we slung over the hood ornament to let the air cool the water. And we had to use it several times.

So, whenever possible, the windows were rolled up and there was smoke. And, as a youth, I had respiratory problems. I guess that would include the constant tonsillitis I had. At age three I remember us pulling up at the doctor’s office and I started to scream. I tried to crawl under the driver’s seat. I clutched at the springs underneath the seat of that 1950 Buick.

But it was all for naught and soon I was inside in the cool air. It was summer and I had chronic tonsillitis but everyone was afraid of polio, so instead of removing my tonsils, I went to the doctor every other day for weeks for a penicillin shot. I feared needles until about the time I got to college.

Sinisitis, bronchitis, I was always fighting those “itises” and always losing. I got a lot of penicillin injections throughout my childhood. Smoke, I remember the smoke.

Finally 1967 came and I was off to college. The first semester I commuted but after that I lived in apartments and most of us either already had the habit, or we began to…smoke. I have always supposed that I didn’t really need the smoke until I left home and no longer had my parent’s second hand smoke to keep me going.

And this was during the revolutionary days when us teenagers decided we knew a whole hell of a lot more about everything than our parents ever had so we rebelled and not only did we smoke cigarettes, but we smoked pot. Marijuana, weed, stuff that was good for a 20 year prison term in Texas in those days, we smoked.

But what the heck. We were young and healthy, we were invulnerable. We were Achilles without the bum heel. And throughout everything we did, we…smoked.

By the time smoking was starting to be understood, most of the smokers my age were absolutely and dreadfully hooked on tobacco. Then they took the ads off of TV. Well that was a shock. For years television had been telling me how good cigarettes were for me and how much fun they were. Every game show contestant went home with a couple cartons and they soothed my T-Zone for god’s sake! I wanted a soothed T-Zone. And doctors smoked. How can there be anything wrong with them if doctor’s smoked them? And more doctors smoked Camels.

But there were those who would rather fight than switch and Women’s Lib, man, almost from the beginning the big tobacco companies were there to support all you bra-burning liberated chicks. “You’ve come a long way baby!”

And so we all…smoked.

Well come about the year 2000 and my lungs were giving up the ghost. I had the proverbial “smoker’s cough.” I coughed at work and in the car and in bed at night. All of those cigarettes over all of those years all that smoke passing across my little baby pink lungs burning away cillia and depositing ugly black masses of tar, and my lungs were just flat giving out.

So I came down with my first big time case of acute bronchitis. I couldn’t breathe. I could not breathe for crying out loud. And the cough was loud and painful and as unproductive as could be and I couldn’t breathe! Don’t you hear me? I CAN NOT BREATHE!

And I got scared and I got paranoid and remember standing up in the middle of my bedroom in the middle of the coal-black night and I had gathered every lamp in the house into my bedroom which blazed with light. But it didn’t help me breathe.

I called a cab and went to the emergency room. “Nothing wrong with you now Mr. Watters, your lungs are clear.”

“But I can’t breathe!”

“Sorry, nothing we can do about it.”

Several nights later I went to another emergency room but they couldn’t help me either.

Spirometer

A couple of months later, after I had stopped smoking, my family physician ran some breathing tests on me. Spirometer it is called. Now the average American breathes with the thorax the chest and that alone. According to my reading, that uses about 70% of your lungs. However, since 1983 I had been studying breath techniques with my Internal Martial Arts Master. I had learned to breathe with my diaphragm and I did it naturally and automatically.

So we began the Spirometer test and I began blowing 90%, 95%, 115% on different sections of the test. So I asked, “Uh, excuse me, but I breathe with my diaphragm which is a more efficient method of breathing. Won’t that affect my test scores?”

“Huh?” The breath folks did not understand breathing with the diaphragm and so a score was a score and my lungs were fine, go away now Mister.

I remembered my brother and me taking our mother to a specialist in Long Beach, California. Oh yeah, Mother died of Emphysema in 1979. And this specialist tried to teach Mother to breathe with her diaphragm, but she had not used it for so long that it no longer functioned. The muscle had just atrophied  away.

Well, I have had this suspicion for years that my lungs were not as good as the test showed. And I battled infections, mainly sinus infections but I didn’t get real sick too often, until last winter. Then I had a little bacterial infection that was gone in a week but it left behind a cough that lasted almost three months. Finally, we were able to get it under control with the help of inhalers.

So, I’ve been kind of afraid for about a year and then this thing just rears up out of nowhere and bites me in a tender place and I go from well one day (okay, sort of well) to zero to sixty flat on my back sick the next.

I began looking around the internet ’cause I couldn’t lie down and sleep anyway. And I discovered the dreaded acronym COPD. And I have it. I think I have the chronic bronchitis kind not the emphysema kind so it will kill me slower. But here I am at 4 am writing because I cannot sleep without coughing even with a belly full of meds. And if I live long enough, COPD will kill me.

If you don’t smoke, don’t start. Seek clean air. If you smoke, do everything in your power to quit. And if you cannot quit, pray that you do not get COPD, or lung cancer…

[Note: Tex Williams The "Smoke! Smoke! Smoke" singer passed away from lung cancer at his home in Newhall, California on October 11, 1985.]

World COPD Day November 18, 2009