Life Tethered to a Concentrator — Caroline Gainer

Some teachers leave you with formulas and lab reports. Others leave you with something that follows you into the harder seasons of life, long after you’ve forgotten the periodic table. When I was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), I found myself reaching back to lessons I…

People who don’t have any experience with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) often imagine the oxygen tubing we use as the easy part. It’s a soft little line that trails behind us like a polite shadow. But those of us who depend on it know better. The tubing is…

There are moments in life with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) that divide everything into the before and the after. Some are dramatic, such as the first hospitalization or the first time you realize that stairs have become mountains. But others arrive quietly, almost shyly, yet still manage to…

When I learned that pilot Chuck Yeager grew up with his family name spelled Jeager, something in me paused. The story goes that when he joined the military, no one could understand how to spell it. He kept repeating himself, trying to explain the German “J” that sounds…

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…