The COPD Foundation topic for the month of May is “Healthy Lungs.”  I often write in first person to share my experiences with COPD.  The reason that I do this is not to gain fame or put myself out there as an expert, but I do this to try to encourage other people with COPD to live the best life that they can.  This life is probably a far cry from the life that you once lived but can be a fulfilling and useful life.  I hope to inspire others to find the life that they can be happy with though they are in some ways limited in what they can do.  It is with this thought that I tackle the idea of healthy lungs.

I have probably never had healthy lungs.  I was a preemie and have a hole in my diaphragm which in some way must limit the efficiency of my lungs.  My whole family and in retrospect I can see that my whole community were smokers.  I cannot remember when I did not want to smoke and have been sent to time-out more than once after being caught smoking buts from the ashtray while hiding under the radio stand.  I add this detail to illustrate how young I was because I thought that I was hidden under that radio stand which was just a small open legged table.

I began the habit of smoking when I was a sophomore in college and established this as a good way to stay awake while studying for invertebrate zoology exams.  It served the purpose of keeping me awake as I commuted from home to school and back.  The cig and a hot cup of coffee kept me on the road many times.  This puts my starting year at around 19-20 years of age.  I smoked from then until I was around 72 years old.  This makes for a lot of years smoking.  I quit because I had a pneumothorax (lung collapse) and was in the hospital for 14 days 11 of which were in intensive care (ICU).  I had already begun to quit smoking by wearing a nicotine patch.  The hospital continued to issue the patch while I was there.

I lived for 13 years in a steel mill town which was surrounded by other industrial towns that used high sulfur coal as their fuel.  In one of the adjoining towns the streetlights came on at noon because the smoke from the factories filtered out the sun.  When going downtown, one had to dawn sunglasses to keep the soot out of your eyes especially if you were a contact lens wearer.  I was taking graduate courses at a local college when I met the man who would become the head of the Environmental Protection Agency.  He was very influential in my pursuing a degree in environmental education.  I did not finish that degree because when Charles Reese (Chick Reese) left the institution so did the drive for classes in the environmental field.  The interest in clean air was also waning because most of the mills had changed to natural gas as their fuel of choice and the streetlights no longer came on at noon in the neighboring town.

I include this history to give you an idea about how damaged my lungs must be.  I have calcium deposits on my lungs which one doctor called arthritis of the lungs.  This doctor was a prominent pulmonologist in the area in which I now reside.  People who worked in the acid cleaning of coal often had these calcium deposits on their lungs and many became very incapacitated because of these deposits.  This doctor determined that the calcium deposits were a way in which the lungs dealt with the acidic environment.  He assumed that the same was true for me since I had been exposed to a very acidic environment produced by the sulfur in the air combining with the water in the air to form sulfuric acid.  The acidic content of the air was quite noticeable because cars which were parked in the mill parking lot all had peeling paint.  I have not researched the validity of this theory prior to writing this post, so please take it with a grain of salt so to speak.

Now and then I seem to approach a topic from the end to the beginning, in other words in a backwards fashion.  Keeping with that I will end with a definition of healthy lungs.  According to the Health and Beauty Digest healthy lungs are “Healthy lungs play an essential role in keeping us strong, healthy, and vital. Respiration feeds every cell in the body with oxygen.

Without enough oxygen, people are more likely to develop respiratory diseases (such as COPD or chronic obstructive pulmonary disease) and heart disease.

However, experts believe that regular breathing is not enough to maintain oxygen flow at peak levels through the body.

During most daily activities, the lungs are only at 50% capacity and only grow with movement and exercise.”

I would not give this an A grade when it comes to definitions.  Healthy lungs are lungs that are free from deformations, and disease. Healthy lungs efficiently remove oxygen from the air and return carbon dioxide back into the air.  Do you have a good definition for healthy lungs?  If you do please comment.  #healthy lungs #COPD Foundation #oxygen360 #COPD360social