Bad Air Days by John Gleeson, Jr.

Can you imagine what it is like not being able to breathe on your own, or to be out of breath after doing something as simple as taking a shower or getting dressed?

Can you imagine not having any visitors during cold and flu season, or not being able to leave your house, except for trips to the doctor and/or the hospital ER?

Can you imagine what it is like to be dependent on others to cook, clean and do housework and laundry? Can you imagine being on so much medication that it looks like a grocery list when it is written out?

If you can imagine any of these then you can understand a disease as debilitating as emphysema. I can imagine this and have personally experienced this. I would like to share my experience with you.

As an educator, I have a responsibility to educate. If, after listening to my story, even one person is affected by it enough to not try smoking, I will feel I've been successful. If one person quits then I've been very successful.

My mother started smoking when she was around 14 years old. She smoked for most of her sixty years. I remember going to visit my mother one day approximately eight years ago. When I walked in the door, I immediately knew that something was wrong. I asked what was wrong and she said she couldn't talk about it, to go ask my older sister. (Because I was the baby in the family, Mom always had to pull her punches with me).

My sister, Cathy, explained the nature of the problem.

My mom had emphysema and had to quit smoking or she would die. I don't recall what I did next, but I do remember having the sniffles--if you know what I mean.

The first thing Cathy did was explain to me exactly what emphysema was. She explained that the lungs have air sacs called alveoli, which allow the body to breathe, and that when someone has emphysema, their lungs can no longer work like they are supposed to.

She further explained that the lungs are made of elastic-like material and that material was stretched out. It's like stretching elastic out until it doesn't stretch anymore. This was the first stage of emphysema.

This was also the beginning of accepting this illness for everyone in the family. When it is in the early stages, it is hardly noticeable except for the persistent cough. But this is only the early stage. In the early stages of my mother's illness she didn't need oxygen, but we knew it would eventually come to that, but we thought it wouldn't be for a while yet.

One year passed, and we noticed Mom's breathing became more labored, especially after going shopping or doing the housework or laundry. One day I went to visit her and she had just gotten back from the doctor's. She was very upset and said she was going to have to start being on oxygen when she needed it. "Okay," I thought, "that's not going to be so bad."

I remember when the people from Capital Oxygen showed up and set up her oxygen tank nonchalantly, as though they were hooking up someone's cable television. I grew to accept that machine to be part of my mother, and it would become the object of many a joke. We could always tell where my mother was by following the hose, and when she would leave the house we would lead her around like a puppy dog on her shortened hose from her portable oxygen tank.

That year she also went to Sunny View Hospital in Schenectady to learn how to breathe again. She made some new friends who were going through the same thing she was. These friends would later prove to be invaluable to her as they formed an informal support group. She left Sunny View after two weeks, and for a time she did not need the oxygen as much.

In March of 1995, disaster struck; my mom started getting sick more frequently.

Emphysema, we learned, breaks down your immune system, just as AIDS does. In fact, we were given hospital masks to wear when we went to visit her if we had a cold. My mother had to be hospitalized in order to fight her infection. I remember going to visit her in the sterile-smelling environment that had become her home away from home, Ellis Hospital. Her immune system was so weak that she had to have her medicine and vitamins fed intravenously so they would enter her bloodstream immediately.

The worst news would come after a few days, when she had to be put on a respirator. She could only remain on the respirator for no more than a week or it would be next to impossible to wean her off it. She did come off the respirator, but she was weakened by it, and would have to take even more pills. She now had to be on oxygen almost all the time.

Little by little things progressed for the worse. Someone who has a terminal illness has good days and bad days. As my mother's illness progressed she would have more bad than good. Always the trooper, she would find some fortitude and continue to fight it. She would even joke about it and would say, "People have bad hair days--well, I have bad air days."

As the disease debilitated her more and more and the trips to the hospital became more frequent, she started having to take more drugs to help her feel better. The next few years saw many diseases rear their ugly heads. The first of these was diabetes caused by a side effect from the prednisone.

The prednisone was great at helping with the breathing but had many bad side effects, every one of which my mother seemed destined to experience. Besides diabetes, she also contracted glaucoma, cataracts and congestive heart failure. The latter was probably caused by her heart having to do twice the work because the lungs were not at their full capacity. My mother had so many different ailments that she would often joke about belonging to the Ailment of the Month Club. In fact, she was given a card at one time that summed it all up. It read, and I quote, "I'VE SURVIVED DAMN NEAR EVERYTHING!!!!" This was later to be her badge of courage.

Her trips in the ambulance and to the hospital became almost regular. We joked about getting frequent flier miles in the ambulance. Once again, we always had humor to help us see the light, even in the darkest of times. We always wondered with each trip to the hospital, would it be our last? More importantly, would it be hers? Each time her stay in the hospital seemed longer and longer. Now she was going for other complications caused by the diabetes, and not just her lungs.

We were given new signs that she was getting worse. She wasn't able to sleep in her bed anymore; she slept in a hospital bed. She was given IVs at home, she slept more often than before, and a neighbor had to come over and tap on her back to help break up the mucus. Looking back on all of this, I would say the thing I had the hardest time dealing with was the fact that what was once her living room had now become her sick bed.

Things got progressively worse, and the end looked to be pretty close at hand. In August of 1997 she caught a cold which developed into pneumonia and she was reluctantly placed back on a respirator for a few days. Her kidneys shut down, another side effect of diabetes that was caused by the prednisone. We decided based on her living will and health care proxy to let nature take its course, a decision I hope none of you ever have to make. She died at Ellis Hospital on August 25th, 1997. We were sad, but relieved that she would not have to pay for her consequences of being a heavy smoker anymore. Since her passing my brother and two sisters have cut down considerably on their smoking and are trying to quit.

Me, I've never tried cigarettes and certainly will not start. I've never had a cigarette in my life and after reading this I hope you never will either.