Life Tethered to a Concentrator — Caroline Gainer

Portable oxygen is a marvel of modern medicine, but anyone who carries it knows it comes with limitations that don’t show up in the brochures. The ads always feature someone strolling through life with a sleek device slung over their shoulder, smiling as if nothing has changed. But real life…

Some mornings in these mountains start with a heaviness I can feel before I even swing my feet out of bed. Not the heaviness of sorrow, though life hands us plenty of that, but the heaviness of breath. The kind that tells me my lungs are already negotiating with…

Living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) has made me pay closer attention to the small, unexpected comforts that steady us. The quiet moments that teach us how to accept help, how to rest, and how to let gentleness find us. I didn’t recognize those lessons when I was…

Ragweed season has rolled in again, announced by the weather service with all the drama of a storm warning. They call it a “pollen outbreak,” but anyone living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) knows it’s more than a line in the forecast. It’s like someone shook a dusty…

Living with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) means living by a rhythm — a quiet, steady kind that keeps the breath moving and the body from slipping into trouble. For years, my morning and evening routine from pulmonary rehabilitation had been my anchor. It wasn’t glamorous, but it worked.

Some mornings, before the world has fully awoken, I sit on my back deck in an old rocking chair and sip what I call my magic coffee. The mountains behind my house are still holding on to the last threads of night, and the air carries that soft hush that…

I’ve been thinking lately about how the language of a life shifts over time. Not the big, dramatic changes, not the kind that come with new jobs or new towns, but the quiet ones. The ones that slip into our vocabulary so gradually we hardly notice them until one day…

On summer nights, when the air settles soft over the hills, and the porch boards hold the day’s last warmth, I watch the lightning bugs rise. They drift up from the grass like sparks shaken loose from the earth, each one carrying its own small lantern. People talk about their…

Note: This column describes the author’s own experiences with various supplements. Not everyone will have the same response to treatment. Consult your doctor before starting or stopping a therapy. Up here in the hills of West Virginia, we’ve always believed in taking care of what you’ve got, because getting more…

Many of us fall into a quiet trap as we get older. A new ache will show up or a task will become harder than it used to be and we’ll shrug it off with a familiar “Well, I’m just getting older.” But aging is not a diagnosis, and…

I’ve learned that fear doesn’t always come from something that’s in front of us. Sometimes it rises from a much older place, a place the body remembers even when the mind has moved on. I can see this clearly now that I live with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD),…