Norma: I was about 15 when I start smoking. I haven't smoked for 20 years. When I stopped smoking, I was at three packs a day and I've probably been there for maybe up to 10 years.
When it first got my attention that maybe something was seriously wrong with me was in China in 1995. I was coughing a lot and I was having increasing trouble getting my breath. When I got home to the United States, I went to see my own doctor and he suggested that I might have COPD.
Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease
Norma: I think of COPD as being a kind of a complex of breathing concerns. There is emphysema, there is asthma and there is chronic bronchitis. What I was told is that my main problem is chronic bronchitis.
When I'm very quiet, if I'm sitting reading the paper in the morning and drinking tea, I don’t feel anything but when I start moving around, my shortness of breath gets in my way, so that for instance I began gasping for breath. I've been hospitalized twice in the last two years.
Can you see that already my breath is beginning to give me trouble? I for instance can't do my own gardening anymore. I can't move my lawn. I have to hire somebody to do that. I can't clean my house. It involves a vast support network of friends, neighbors and professionals.
Treatment and Exercise
Norma: I didn't know for instance that if you breathe through your nose, you get more oxygen than if you breathe in your mouth. So, they teach you how to do a breathing technique which I'll try and show you where you breathe in through your nose and then out by piercing your lips and what that does is it forces the bronchial tubes open. When I start to do the breathing techniques and start to take in clear air that I start to get color back in my face.
I exercise in the water three days a week. I have inhaled steroids; three different inhalers. I spend a lot of time and it really irritates me. I hate spending this much time on—I was going to say on useless things but it isn't useless, it's my health.
Looking back
Norma: When I look back, one of the things that I regret is that I didn't stop smoking earlier. When I see young people smoking, I just want to tell them how awful it is to live with not being able to breath.
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