Have you ever stopped to think about your children and grandchildren when you smoke?
This is a stunning testamony of how one daughter feels about her Mother's last days:
Why aren’t we talking about COPD?
This past March my mother passed away from complications associated with COPD – Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. She had been a smoker all her life, and it finally caught up to her.
It made me wonder why we do not hear more about this horrible, fatal disease. COPD is the third leading cause of death in the United States, and there is no cure. The agony I watched my mother go through was heart wrenching, and tested me to my emotional limits.
It created a giant rift in our relationship and sometimes, I will admit, I resented her. I was angry with her. She had done this to herself! The addiction was so strong that even though the doctors gave her a year to live unless she stopped smoking, she continued to do so.
In the end, she was in hospice and in a nursing home. The last week or so of her life she was incoherent and didn’t recognize me when I came to visit. This pained me, because she had always been an independent woman and now she was in diapers and completely dependent on others. My only hope is that she did not realize what was happening to her.
The last few days of her life she just lay in bed, on morphine and other heavy medications. Slowly she started to lose the use of her extremities, and eventually she was completely immobile. The nurses and doctors told me that she could still hear me, and through my tears I would tell her stories that I remembered of us spending time together. I had to talk fairly loud so that she could hear me over her “death rattle,” which is common in end-stage COPD patients.
I was there by her side, along with a nurse and her long-time best friend as she gasped for her last breath of air. Unfortunately my little sister did not make it to the nursing home in time to be with her as she passed. Her passing came quicker than we realized, which I guess in some ways was a blessing.
I write this not just to tell a story, but hopefully to make people stop and think about the effects of smoking. It doesn’t just affect you. It affects your loved ones.
Please, if you are a smoker, make your next cigarette your last cigarette. It won’t be easy, but most things in life worth doing aren’t.
Barbara Clark, originally from South Florida, has lived in Tallahassee since 2001 when she moved here to attend Florida State University. She is currently employed as an archaeologist.
http://www.tallahassee.com/story/opinion/2016/09/23/talking-copd/90948600/
Blessed today to be Smoke FREE!
N.O.P.E.!
