Life Tethered to a Concentrator - a Column by Caroline Gainer

Some symptoms arrive with fanfare — a cough that won’t settle, a flare that tightens the chest, a night when the oxygen just doesn’t feel like enough. But others slip in quietly. Lately, I’ve been having days when my temperature rises just a little above normal. Not a true fever,…

When I was a young girl, I had a hen named Wimpy. She got her name because she had a game leg and limped when she walked, but that limp never slowed her determination. Wimpy laid 12 eggs and rolled them, one by one, to her nest. Then she settled…

When I was a little girl, my mother often sent me to the cornfield with my father. I suspect it was partly to give her a moment of quiet, because I was at the age of endless questions. Daddy didn’t mind. He handed me a hoe and gave me a…

Navigating a diagnosis of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) is a lot like driving one of those narrow West Virginia backroads with blind curves and no guardrails. The kind of road where you ease off the gas without being told, because you’ve lived long enough to know that what…

When I was in elementary school, I told my parents that something was crawling on me at night. They exchanged the kind of knowing look adults give when they think a child is expressing emotion instead of sensation. They suspected school stress or a plea to sleep between them. But…

People with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) may know what to do in a breathing crisis, but that doesn’t always mean we will do the correct thing. When I was diagnosed, I knew that when my portable concentrator beeped to tell me I was running short on battery…

This Easter, I found myself at home with nothing special planned. No ham in the oven, no table set, no small ritual to mark the day. Just a quiet house and a long afternoon. And somewhere in that stillness, I realized I’d let chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) shrink…

I was on one of my “let’s see where this road goes” adventures, the kind with those blind curves you don’t see until you’re already in them, when I noticed something unsettling. My portable oxygen concentrator (POC) wasn’t giving me oxygen with every breath. It wasn’t a dramatic failure, just…

There are times in life when illness doesn’t just slow you down— it rearranges you. I didn’t see it happening at first. I thought I was simply tired or behind, in need of a weekend to catch up. But slowly, almost quietly, I began to lose the version of myself…

There are days when I realize my world has grown smaller without my permission. After illness, the boundaries of daily life contract almost imperceptibly. A trip that once felt routine — like driving to Tamarack, West Virginia, a place I’ve known for years — suddenly feels foreign, as…