Comparison can be good for the soul...

[Timberman]

I do not often write on here but it seemed these musing may be of interest to others so here goes...

ONE of the great advantages I find from attending the courses run by the Pulmonary Rehabilitation Service (PRS) is comparison.

And after today's session I feel encouraged. Not that I am significantly better for my exertions but because I understand better how I really am. Let me explain.

Some 20 years ago I nearly died from Acute Myeloid Leukemia. Thanks to the brilliant doctors at Norfolk and Norwich and Addenbrookes Hospitals I am alive to write this. Two session of chemo led to an allogenic bone marrow transplant which thus far seems to have worked well. They say you are never cured. Ah well, at least it feels like it.

Anyway I recovered only to get a serious bout of pneumonia. And in the course of that a lung biopsy revealed COPD – specifically emphysema and bronchiectasis.

So within a couple of years I attended my first PRS course in Norfolk (where we lived. I was among the youngest in class and my condition better than most. It did me physically and mentally much good. Two more courses followed before I moved to Essex. There I had two PRS courses in Braintree before COVID shut it all down. And this week I started back on the new course.

They work you fairly hard but kindly with it and the twice weekly session includes some advisory chats – to me now repetitive but it is amazing how much you forget, so very worthwhile.

But it is the affect on my fortunately quite strong Positive Mental Attitude which matters even more. And that is the result of comparing myself with others. Not in an unkind way, please understand.

For, while back at those first courses I was encouraged by being fitter than any even though younger; now I find I am not fitter but I am older than the majority. And by a moderate margin. And not as bad as my "black dog" days might suggest!

What that means is that while, as the lung specialist said 10 years ago, I may have the lungs of a 95 year old, it seems that today, a decade on, I am aging fairly well, all things considered.

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Now, at these sessions we have a talk with chat and we provide our own experiences to assist others. It is good stuff and worth the tea and biccy. But it set me thinking – how did I end up like this?

It starts, and there seems some agreement on this, when I was a few months old in 1943. I am told I was sleeping in a cot under the oak dining table in the back room when a V1 Flying Bomb hit the house at the end of our garden. The blast blew the entire conservatory through the French doors of the room I was in. I suffered no injury but was plucked dust shrouded from the wreckage.

Our first GP – a police 'surgeon' as they were called of little wit misdiagnosed bronchitis in the baby-child that was me that he treated. In 1948 the NHS came into existence and we had a new, younger and wiser GP. He went to some trouble to diagnose asthma and new treatment started wth some good effect. It was essentially ''childhood' asthma and disappeared at 16 or so.

But in those days everybody smoked so no surprise that at about 14 I nicked my first fags from mum and lit up behind the cycle sheds. The disastrous decision is why I am now where I am. I hit 20-30 a day and smoked like a chimney until reaching 50 in 1993. I stopped. £54 of hypnotherapy went where no other trick had gone before.

Unhelpful to my lungs may have been the years I spent in the newspaper business, especially my years in Fleet Street. There I worked in the print room, supervising the assembly of the old hot metal pages. The air was thick with hot metal fumes, flying paper dust from the press hall next door and residual ink spray. We thought nothing of it then.

Today? Well my money is on a combination effect except for one additional thing.

My maternal grandmother died of what was called bronchial pneumonia at 64 in 1952. She smoked all her life. My mother died of pneumonia after years with emphysema (undiagnosed COPD therefore) in 1993 at age77. My brother by that mother has COPD. But neither of my half brothers by an earlier wife has any such thing. And one is now 86!

So lifestyle, pollution and genetics. These are the three crosses that bear my name.

[Feelingblessed2013]

Thank you for sharing your story. You are right about lifestyle, pollution and genetics. I smoked like a chimney for about 25 years (started at 15, quit at 40). Both my parents smoked, spent much of my childhood in my granmothers bar (were people smoked). Both my parents were diagnosed with emphysema. Dad died in his early 70's, mom was in her mid 80's. I also lived 10 years in a town known for high radon levels, but I had no idea (radon can cause lung cancer). At 53 I was diagnosed with emphysema and lung cancer. Since then I have lost both upper lung lobes to lung cancer. But for the last 4 and a half years I have been cancer free. I will be 66 next month, but I'm still here.

[Timberman in reply to Feelingblessed2013]

Well done! And thank you. You are obviously a fighter with a good PMA; it counts for a lot I believe. I too lived in a high radon area for a few years (south coast Devon!) but happily not much granite in our area!