I Meet My First Pulmonary Doctor

Fast forward to 2002. Hmmmm, can’t get out and about for work as well as I used to be able to. Hmmmm, it takes me twice as long to clean a horse stall now. Hmmmmm, those 50-lb. bags of feed sure seem to be getting heavier. Hmmmm, better look into this.

That’s about when I found the COPD-Support and COPD International boards. Holy cow, you’re supposed to be seeing a pulmo doc, not just a pcp. Holy cow, you’re supposed to get a 6-min walk test (to see if you should be on supplemental oxygen) and you should go to pulmonary rehab. Wow! Blink, blink....light bulb going on.

And so started my education on COPD. I learned you usually cannot get into rehab unless you’re not smoking...so I quit smoking. Just tossed them out the window one day and said “That’s that. I am not a smoker.” So easy to say; so difficult to do, sometimes. Whenever the urge to have a cigarette hit, I’d clean some part of the house. I had the cleanest house in the area for awhile there! Luckily, we couldn’t smoke at work so there really wasn’t a temptation there. Another thing I did was stop going into the store where I usually bought my cigarettes. I even took a different road to work so I wouldn’t even go past that store. And that was that!

Found a respected pulmo doctor in Stroudsburg...who told me during my second visit to him that if I ever went into the hospital, I probably wouldn’t come out!! SCARY!!! Cried all the way home; called my kids; called friends....and eventually fired the doc! He was going just on my numbers, not on ME...and that’s what counts in the long run. He saw that my FEV1 was .61 liters...very severe. He didn’t notice that it had been at that very same number since 1994. Nah, I surely didn’t need someone quite so blunt, thank you very much, no matter how good people said he was.

Lesson Forwarded .... If you smoke, STOP