Breath Of Life

I was a runner. A restaurateur. In the prime of my life. Then came the shocking diagnosis.

- Sean Cummings

MY WIFE, CATHY, SAT WITH ME in the doctor’s office. I needed her there. It was hard for me to process what was being said. When you don’t get enough oxygen in your lungs, it affects your brain too. After three years of seeing specialist after specialist with no diagnosis, I was depressed. I was constantly sick, too weak to help around the house, struggling for every breath and so exhausted I could barely work.

The doctor looked up from my chart, peered over his glasses and said, “Sean, from all that you’ve said and what the tests show, I think you have the beginnings of COPD.”

COPD. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. It was like getting a death sentence. I’d read enough to know: There was no cure. It could only get worse. I’d be wheezing till the end. Cathy held my hand. She asked a few questions, but I hardly heard the answers. I wanted to get out of that office as fast as I could. COPD—the worst news I could have imagined.

I’d watched both of my parents die of lung-related diseases. They puffed on cigarettes all day long. Dad would fall asleep with a cigarette in his mouth— amazing the house didn’t burn down. He owned a tile-setting company, and my brothers and I helped in the family business. Inhaling clouds of powdered cement, breathing in construction debris. Dad’s first bout with cancer came when he was 40—and yet he lived another 48 years, hauling around an oxygen tank with him. Mom was diagnosed with emphysema decades after Dad got cancer.

I wasn’t going to be like them. I had smoked in my early twenties, then given it up. I was intent on living healthily. I ran marathons, swam at the Y, worked out at the gym, played soccer with my buddies, tossed a football with our kids. Call me a fitness fanatic. That’s fine by me. I wanted to rewrite the family script.