Imagine hearing a cough so loud, it is as if an avalanche is rumbling out of someone’s body. Imagine seeing someone’s chest stop rising and falling as they sleep, knowing they stopped breathing. Imagine witnessing the horrifying scene of black tar shooting out of a person’s lungs. That is COPD. COPD stands for chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It is a mixture of chronic bronchitis and emphysema. COPD gets worse over time, and is irreversible. The damage it does to the lungs is far too severe to heal. Most people with COPD die from this disease, and sadly, my father was diagnosed five months ago. Since the diagnosis, my father has discovered some ways to cope with this disease, my family learned a great deal from it, and my conclusion is that the situation could have been handled better.
My father inhaled his first cigarette at the age of nine, and he is now 53 years old. If you did the math correctly, that adds up to 44 years of smoking. At about 10-15 cigarettes a day, which adds up to 160,000 total cigarettes, can you imagine the weight of tar that has added up over the years? I can, and I witness the effects it has on my father every day. Although he knows this disease will most likely be the cause of his death, he has found ways to cope. In the beginning months of his symptoms, …show more content…
He went from smoking more than half a pack a day to not at all. Even though it has not been very long since his last cigarette, I am very proud of him. However, the two things I wish he would have done differently are take his disease seriously and quit tobacco completely. In the first two months of his diagnosis, he did not take it as seriously as I would have hoped he would. I now see why it was so difficult for him to come to the realization that he could die from this. Also, now instead of smoking, he chews. He looks at chewing as an alternative; I look at it as mouth cancer. I wish he would quit tobacco all
My father inhaled his first cigarette at the age of nine, and he is now 53 years old. If you did the math correctly, that adds up to 44 years of smoking. At about 10-15 cigarettes a day, which adds up to 160,000 total cigarettes, can you imagine the weight of tar that has added up over the years? I can, and I witness the effects it has on my father every day. Although he knows this disease will most likely be the cause of his death, he has found ways to cope. In the beginning months of his symptoms, …show more content…
He went from smoking more than half a pack a day to not at all. Even though it has not been very long since his last cigarette, I am very proud of him. However, the two things I wish he would have done differently are take his disease seriously and quit tobacco completely. In the first two months of his diagnosis, he did not take it as seriously as I would have hoped he would. I now see why it was so difficult for him to come to the realization that he could die from this. Also, now instead of smoking, he chews. He looks at chewing as an alternative; I look at it as mouth cancer. I wish he would quit tobacco all