My Son, My Coach

Exercise? With my COPD, I could barely walk across a room

- CANDYCE NORRIS

My husband, jim, added an-other pill to the pile of meds on the kitchen counter. Ever since my release from the hospital two days earlier, he’d kept careful track of which ones I needed to take and when. It was overwhelming, everything I would need to do to recover. And most of it was on me. It’s not as if Jim or anyone else could breathe for me. This is hopeless, I thought. I’m never going to be able to do this.

Just then, my youngest son, Jeremey, walked into our apartment. “What did the doctor say?” he asked. Jim had taken me to a follow-up pulmonologist appointment earlier that morning.

“He wants me to go to pulmonary rehabilitation,” I said, trying to sound more positive than I felt. “It meets two or three times a week about managing COPD, learning to monitor and better control breathing, managing stress and exercising. It sounds great, but with your dad out of work, we just can’t afford it. I asked him if I could do it on my own.”