My heart goes out to all of you who are suffering from COPD and to their loved ones who are watching them go though this. I hope that by telling you this story you will think before you pick up that next cigarette, and hopefully I will be able to help myself in my own grieving process by telling someone of the events that haunt me. And yes, I could have placed my parents in a home as so many other children do. But if you knew me, you wouldn't even question my decision.

My mother was diagnosed with COPD in the fall of 1990. She had a cough that just wouldn’t go away. She was a smoker and worked around forklifts. The exhaust from these just help the progress the disease along. At that time they told her to quit smoking, and started her on inhalers of abuterol. She did quit smoking that day. She did fine for the first couple years like this, but then she caught a nasty flu bug in January of 1992, that developed into pneumonia and really sent her for a loop. It sent her to the hospital for the first of many times and when she came home she brought the twins with her. That is what we came to call the portable oxygen tank (2 lpm) and the fanny pack full of inhalers and meds. She was told at that time she had 52% lung capacity and that she was now officially retired. She was 63 and thought that she would enjoy being able to relax. She convinced my dad to retire with her, which he did, and they settled down for the long haul.
By the summer of 2002 mom was having attacks that were sending her to the hospital on a monthly basis. Her breathing issues were causing so much stress on her heart that it was over working itself. She was on so many different medications that she had to keep the schedule of what, when and how much in a notebook. Some of the medications couldn’t be taken together, or she had to sit up for an hour prior and after taking it, a few were only on an empty stomach and other only on a full stomach. It is mind boggling to me now when I think about it.
August of 2003, mom calls and asks if I will go pick up some dinner for her and Daddy at their favorite restaurant. They were both really tired, the summer heat of the day had worn them out and neither wanted to cook. I get to the house and get things set up at the table for them. I go in and wake Daddy up and go knock on the bathroom door for mom. No answer at the bathroom door. My dad mumbles to me something about her falling asleep in there again as he walks to the table. I wait a minute and knock again. This time I hear a moan, I open the door slowly and she is on the floor clenching her chest. I run for the phone dial 911, give her an aspirin, and turn up her oxygen. The ambulance comes and takes her to the hospital with me in hot pursuit. I was going to get some answers. The nurses call her regular doctors and they come down. I TELL my mother that she is to agree that I am told everything. She signs the papers, and they lead me into the hallway and they just let me have it. My mother at that time had 4 blockages in her arteries. Her lung capacity was down to 30% in her left lung, and the right lung was collapsing. After talking with her we tell the doctors that she wants the surgery but they are going to give her an IV sedation instead putting her completely out. No ventilator. She does great and comes home 4 days later.
January 29, 2004, mom falls, breaks her ankle, and it requires emergency surgery to reattach it to her leg. During the surgery she has 3 heart attacks. We also discover that her right lung had complete collapsed and was dead tissue so she was breathing completely on only the left lung at 11%. She had also developed a 7mm mass in the bottom of the left lung and it was confirmed as small cell lung cancer. I brought my mother home to live with me and my family on February 16th, 2005. On May 24th, I had her transported to a in-house hospice facility to hopefully reduce the fluid that was filling up in her chest and around her heart. My mother passed away on May 25, 2004, the nurses had not even completed all the paperwork for her admittance. She suffocated to death, she was gasping but nothing was going in, her eyes were huge, and she started to change from pale to a purplish color, I held her hand and watched as there was nothing I could do for her other then give her liquid morphine by the dropper full in hopes that it would take effect in time. It did not. I have never told anyone else of how she suffered in the end. I told everyone that she went quietly in her sleep. I don’t want them to know the pain I feel, knowing she suffered so much pain. My kids would be destroyed knowing this. These few moments are just one of the horrible dreams that haunt me every night.
On the day of my mothers fall my father tried to help her up, but his health had also decline immensely over the years. The 6’5”, 275 lb, man that everyone referred to as the “walking wall”, was now an old man that could barely walk from the bedroom to the bathroom 15 feet away without stopping to catch his breath. When I tell my father of my mothers condition while sitting in the emergency waiting room he has a nervous breakdown and collapses to the floor. I admit my father to the hospital also and during his stay he is diagnosed with COPD, CHF, HBP, and a severe case of depression. After a couple weeks in the hospital and couple more in a rehabilitation facility he comes to live with my family also. He refused to accept that he was sick. I would fight with him constantly to wear his oxygen, or to take his medications. He was so lost without her, and he didn’t want to go on. No matter what I tried, from telling him that I needed him to his grandchildren asking him to please hang on. For 11 months I watched as my Daddy slowly disappeared. On the morning of April 14th, I noticed he had a high fever, and had him transported to the hospital. He whispered to me that he was scared to be alone and made me promise not to leave him. They said that his systems were shutting down and it would only be hours. He weighed 94 lbs. at that time. I sat next to him all day and laid next to him and slept at night. In the morning of the 16th, my dad lightly whispered that he wanted to go home to die. He was frightened in the hospital. So I had him discharged and brought him home. On April 16th, 2005, my Daddy took his final breath while I kissed his forehead goodbye for the final time. I cried for days, developed a fever and sore joints. My doctor who my husband insisted I see, said it was due to sheer exhaustion. Three days after my father’s funeral I was admitted to the hospital for emergency surgery on my jaw and mouth. I had contracted osteomyletis either from my father directly or from the time I stayed with my father in the hospital. I refused to allow them to do an autopsy, and would not allow them to test any fluids that the hospital lab may have still had on the premises from my fathers stay. I don’t ever want to know for sure how I was infected for sure, I don’t think mentally I could handle it if the results were that it was from my father. I lost all of my teeth, and a large portion of my lower and upper jawbone. I am in the process of reconstructive surgery to replace the missing bone and teeth currently.
I hope that after reading this that you think about me sitting here on my couch night after night, crying because I miss my parents so much that I feel as though I am having a heart attack. If just one person stops smoking or decides that they never will start because of this maybe it will help me start finding something good out of all this pain.
COPD caused by smoking is a horrible thing for the person that suffers from the disease but it is just as horrible on those that they leave behind to continue to remember the pain and suffering that they could not help stop. So if you don’t stop for you, please stop for all the me’s out there.

C