Breathe really deep. As deep as you can. Hold...hold...now exhale slowly. Relish it. Love the air. If you did this, then your bronchial tubes are most likely healthy and not inflamed.
See, I have COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disorder.) Those of you that know me, or know of the disease, know that COPD is emphysema and/ or chronic bronchitis. I got this bullshit from smoking.
I cannot in words convey how it feels when my bronchial tubes inflame to the point to where they almost flatten out, and I can't breathe. The closest I can come is to ask: you know that asshole friend or bully, who when you went swimming together waited until you went underwater and then held your head there until you were in a panic? It's something like that. Like being held underwater. A perfect panic. Your heart races, your face gets furnace-hot. You feel, for a split second, like giving up and dying, only everything in your body rises up and rejects the idea. So the end result is you sitting there, face hot, heart pummeling your chest, and everything around you swims in and out of focus as your oxygen-starved body flickers like a bulb about to burn out.
But I'm still here. I'm still fucking standing.
And I'm five. years. free.
Free of the poison. Free of the addiction. Free of the suffocating toxin of cigarettes. I smoked for the thirty three years that my body was in top condition. In my twenties I never noticed a thing. In my thirties I spent many mornings hacking up tar before going to work, but that was a necessary nuisance. In my forties I wasn't as fast as I used to be, but I was chugging right along, not even a single visit to my doctor's office.
In my fifties I started to cough up blood. To get so winded that several times on my job I pissed my pants. I started to get sick too often. I had, lodged in my left lung, a wad of what was first thought to be a tumor, but later verified as a "pneumatic mass." It's a clump of tar and fluid that had got stuck in my lung. It was removed surgically.
So now I have a lung and three-fourths of a lung.
Still, beaten down as I may appear to be, I stared down that sonofabitch addiction and set fire (literally) to my fear. I set fire to my last carton of cigarettes, vowing from then on that it was finished. I watched them burn. I was afraid, and I paid. the. price.
For three weeks I was in a panic. I tried different medications and stop-smoking aids, but what won in the end was my desire to kill the addiction. So I simply went without. It was painful. I sweated. I was nervous and agitated. I was shaky with withdrawals. But I was also determined.
Do I still want cigarettes? Sadly, yes. I always will. But if I'm sitting in my chair, drinking one of the few beers I allow myself nowadays, and I feel the need, all I have to do is conjure up the image of that panic. Of being drowned. Then, it doesn't seem as urgent a need as before.
There is no cure for COPD. I've done the damage and I'll have to live with it. But if this brings me down, I want a by-God victory or two of my own against it before the end.
This is why we fight. We fight for our health, for our families, for our neighbors, for our very lives. And that's something Democrats should be proud of; we fight for those that are fighting tooth and nail for themselves. We give the powerless a hand up, and the powerful a gut check.