“Don’t look back. Something might be gaining on you.”—Satchel Paige’s Rule #6.
#
A few weeks ago, I had a sudden loss in stamina. Suddenly, I was huffing and puffing on the tennis court. I walked my dog around the block and had to rest half an hour afterward. I had to mow my lawn in three separate installments over the course of two days. One drink after dinner knocked me out.
Something was drastically wrong.
“You’re getting older, you know,” said my wife.
“I’d have it checked out, if I were you,” said my daughter.
Out of an abundance of self-solicitude, I went to see my doctor. I explained it all to him.
“It’s not like chronic fatigue syndrome or anything like that, Doc,” I said. “I mean, I don’t feel exhausted all the time. I just get worn out easily whenever I exert myself.”
My doctor, a nice young man who knows far more than anybody half my age ought to know, frowned and pulled on his lip.
He had me get me up on his table, and he listened to my heart and lungs, thumped my back, squeezed my calves.
Then he checked my chart on his computer. “You’ve had blood tests recently, and everything looks okay. I’ll order a test today just to rule out thyroid issues or anemia. But . . . .”
He stared searchingly into his computer screen while he tapped on the keyboard. “You were a smoker, weren’t you?”
“Yes,” I said. “I quit forty-five years ago.”
“I’m glad you did,” he said.
“Me too.”
“But you were never a . . . heavy smoker?”
“I was a heavy smoker. Two to four packs a day for about fifteen years.”
He scowled into the computer. “Well, I’m just thinking, if there was some lung damage and you’re having shortness of breath—”
“You’re thinking COPD?”
He nodded. “Have you ever used an inhaler?”
I shook my head no.
“I could give you one, for daily use, not for rescue. It would let you get more oxygen.”
“Hmm.”
“We should do a pulmonary function test first. It’s the gold standard, for diagnosing COPD.”
So we scheduled a pulmonary function test.
#
I must say I was relieved. Now I had a definite plan. COPD made a lot of sense. My mom had it. My dad may have had it, undiagnosed.
I haven’t smoked in almost fifty years, and I’ve never had any trouble breathing. But if all those cigarettes inhaled in a misspent youth actually caused permanent damage to my lungs, that could be just catching up with me now.
I did not like the idea. But it did fit with the increasing shortness of breath I now feel when I do things.
An inhaler might be just the ticket. Maybe it would help me regain a bit of élan.
#
“O new Favorite Writer,” I hear you cry, “say it ain’t so! How could you do such a thing to yourself? Why would a person suck in all that polluted air voluntarily, and pay Big Tobacco thousands of dollars for the privilege? Why did you do something so DUMB?”
Well, I was dumb when I was young, Dear Reader. It took me hundreds of years to get to be the wise guy I am now.
By the way, if you were not born soon enough to have lived in the middle of the last century, you wouldn’t believe what things were like back then.
Everybody smoked. Well, almost everbody.
More than half of adult men smoked, and almost a third of women. There was no Clean Indoor Air Act. Everywhere you went, the atmosphere was stale and blue. Even if you were one of those who didn’t smoke, you could get cancer just walking through a crowded restaurant.
Oh, yes! Everybody smoked in restaurants. Some people took a break in mid-meal to light up a cigarette. They couldn’t put it off till after dessert. There were ashtrays on the tables.
Streets and sidewalks were littered with cigarette butts. People would simply drop them on the pavement and crushed them out under the sole of their shoe. You wouldn’t want to start a fire.
My mom and dad both smoked. I remember being inside a closed car on a winter day, when I was six or eight years old, both of them smoking cigarettes. I complained loudly that I couldn’t breathe. They told me to be quiet.
How could I be a reliable witness to my suffering? I was just a kid, what did I know? Children should be seen and not heard. That’s the attitude many adults had toward children, even children they loved, back in the good old days.
My parents did not want me and my sister to smoke. “Do as we say,” they said, “not as we do.” They tried to quit the habit many times, unsuccessfully until they were much older.
When I went off to college, most of my classmates smoked. Somehow, it seemed to us the adult thing to do. All those famous intellectuals and movie stars smoked. W.H. Auden didn’t get all those wrinkles from existential doubt.
What about Jean-Paul Sartre? What about Beckett?
What about Edward R. Murrow?
As college men and women, we considered ordinary cigarettes like Camels or Luckies or Pall Mall or Chesterfields . . . plebeian. French intellectuals, like French cab drivers, smoked Gauloises. In the college bookstore, we could buy English Ovals or Benson & Hedges. You know, really distinguished smokes.
Anyone who was ever in the military can tell you that when your drill sergeant marched your platoon or flight to someplace where you had to stand around and wait for a while, he would say, “At ease! . . . Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em.” Or just the laconic, “Light ’em up.” At least we were expected to police our butts. Military streets were not littered like civilian ones.
I smoked heavily most of the years from age eighteen until my late thirties.
#
“With all that incentive to smoke, O New Favorite Writer, how did you ever quit?”
The short answer is that, after many failed attempts, I attended a single smokers’ hypnosis session. The post-hypnotic suggestion I was given seems to have worked.
But there is another factor, which I would be remiss not to mention: Society started leaning the other way. Instead of facilitating cigarette use at every turn, Society—that indefinable beast—started to discourage smoking.
Of course there were the standard nonprofits—the Heart Association, the American Cancer Society, the Tuberculosis Association, et cetera—sponsoring anti-smoking radio and TV spots. But even more potent, the government weighed in. With a whole succession of measures—a broadcast advertising ban, cigarette package warning labels, state-sponsored clean indoor air acts, and sharp increases in federal and state tobacco taxes, they changed the normal expectation from smoking to nonsmoking over the course of a few decades.
Simply put: At the time I quit smoking, in the 1980s, it was easier than it had ever been in my lifetime to be a non-smoker. And the downside of smoking—the foul air, the bad breath, the traces of ash and tar almost everywhere—were so much more apparent when contrasted with the increasing number of smoke-free islands that were gradually created.
My political instincts are conservative. I tend to distrust government and look askance at their motives. I don’t want the people who are supposed to guarantee our freedom to intrude on it instead. But one would have to be a fool not to acknowledge the enormous benefits we have all derived as a result of government action to make smoking unattractive.
My daughter has never smoked. Neither have my grandchildren. Thank you, God.
Those public environmental actions, in addition to the more general Clean Air and Clean Water acts, have given us all a much cleaner environment. Hats off to the government for these accomplishments.
#
So, I went and took my pulmonary function test at Meriter Hospital. It consisted of putting my mouth on a tube and alternately sucking air in and then forcibly expelling it. This was all done in a glass booth, with the column of air mysteriously linked to electronic sensors which read the results into a computer program.
I got the results on MyChart within a few hours: Normal lung function. No problems. No COPD.
That’s good news, Dear Reader. Great news, in fact. Despite my years of smoking, I seem to have gotten off scot-free.
That should make me happy. But I am crestfallen.
I have no use for an inhaler now. But I still get short of breath and tire much more easily than only a few months ago.
ANOTHER TRAGIC VICTIM OF NORMAL AGING.
(Sigh.)
And blessings,
Larry F. Sommers
Your New Favorite Writer
