It all started in 2015. “That’s when I started to really feel unwell. Smoking did it. I’d had asthma since I was 26, but I thought I had that under control. I was a heavy smoker, and it was the coughing. It started with coughing. I was building phlegm all the time, and doctors said it was more like emphysema and related to COPD.”
But then, from about her mid-30s, things gradually got worse. Now, at 65, Bella has been diagnosed with full-blown Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease, and when asked about the effects of COPD on her life, she has only one word to say, “drastic.” The way she ended up was a far cry from the person she once was.
“I’ve always been a very fit person. I was always on the move, always doing something. That had stopped.
“I was at the point where I had to stop and rest every 20 yards or something, so I could get my breath back. I was only sleeping two or three hours a night, and then I would wake up in a coughing fit, or I would wake up breathless. I was just not sleeping well.
“It was always broken sleep; I was always waking up about every two or three hours to either breathe or to cough.”
For heavy sufferers, COPD might be slightly more bearable if only for its breathing difficulty, but a common feature of the condition is a regular stream of anxiety attacks.
“Of course, that’s there because I’m struggling to breathe, and I’m getting more and more upset because I can’t finish what I’m doing. I had to stop. I had to give up even making an effort.
“I loved mowing lawns; I can’t do that. Or, I should say I couldn’t do that because I’m starting to do it now. Now I can do a lot of things again.”
For Bella, almost everything changed when she became whole food plant-based. And, after such a long experience with COPD, she can now clearly identify what has changed. She can recognise what traditional medicine does and doesn’t do.
“In all this time they haven’t changed the medications. I’m still getting the same medications I was getting five years ago. I was gradually getting worse, not better. They were giving me steroids.”
Bella found out about using nutrition to help treat her condition when she was given a copy of Whole Food Living magazine last November.
“It’s been a big change. I’m now doing a lot of things I wasn’t able to do. And I can truly say I’m not stressed anymore over any of it.”
The problem of stress is a major issue in COPD. It comes from the fear of not being easily able to catch your next breath or of whether you will catch it at all. A combination of a sense of panic, frustration and anger sets in.
Sufferers of the disease experience frustration at the loss of things they could once easily do and anger at themselves for letting it get this way.
When she read the first copy of the magazine, she found that a comment in the story by Rajaram Raman P48 (WFL Issue 1) made all the difference.
“I read it had done wonders for him, but it was the black cat in the basket story that did it. It helped me get rid of a lot of the food like dairy that I loved, LOVED. It was the way he described milk as being like puss. It reminds me. That’s how I see milk now. It’s just the way he described some of the foods and him explaining what some of those foods where helped, helped a lot.
Bella says her family members are amazed at the difference they see in her.
“They can’t get over it. They don’t see the coughing. They don’t see me struggling to breathe. The most dramatic thing for me is the coughing and the stress because I used to go and hide so they wouldn’t have to see it, but they knew it was happening anyway.”
Bella’s change has also had an impact on the wider family.
“They’re trying to give up the sugar and dairy. They’re not willing to give up the meat yet.”
Becoming whole food plant-based is not always an easy change for some, but for Bella, it was worth it.
“For me, it certainly was worth it. I did it for my health. I mean, I was at a point where I felt I was looking at death’s door.
“Now I can actually mow the lawns, clean my house and do my washing all in one day. Before it was broken up within the week. It would take me two or three days to mow a lawn and almost all day to wash my own clothes, which is not much.”
Bella now believes medical professionals should be looking at suggesting dietary change as an option for dealing with COPD.
“I think they should be looking at it. They keep giving us more drugs instead of advising us of the natural stuff out there.”
COPD: An outsider’s experience
by Peter Barclay
I knew that talking to Bella was never going to be easy, and I avoided it for several weeks. It wasn’t so much what I thought she might say that ruffled me; it was the deep-seated memories I knew she would awaken in me that bothered most.
My mother suffered and died of COPD, and it was the most horrifying experience for all of us. The picture you see below is of a woman I never knew. This lady was healthy and had endless energy. If I recall, I was maybe five or six years old when I last saw her looking this way.
I was the oldest of three younger siblings. We all knew the person who left us on November 12, 1975, at the age of 54 was only a faint resemblance to the woman you see in this picture.
Mum’s sickness was bad from my early years in primary school and only got worse. In the end, she could hardly walk up the hallway without gasping for air, and she often collapsed on the floor from the lack of it. Another tank of oxygen, which always stood on her side of the bed, became her only hope.
And then there were the pills – just an endless array of them. All sorted into plastic containers.
On a really bad night, she would gasp for air, get nothing, then reach for an inhaler on the bedside table. If she missed it or couldn’t find it in the dark, she panicked. Then everything would get much worse.
In those moments, her anxiety seemed to increase tenfold, and the oxygen mask made little difference. The sound of her gasping for air was unbearable. Then we would hear Dad calling for the ambulance.
Sometimes us kids never came out to see her off. We could hear them trying to bring “the stretcher” in through the front door, and we just lay there thinking. “Is she going to die tonight?”
It took years for Mum to die. And, by the time she did achieve it, she had stopped smoking for seven years. Some days were better than others, but Mum was always sick.
None of us fully realised that she was addicted to the ‘cancer sticks’ she so desperately craved. Funny how things work out, though, she never got cancer. Chronic emphysema was her lot instead. At one stage, Mum was manager of the IHC workshop in Masterton.
I remember some of the rooms there being covered in a fine white powder that came from the balloons they tested. That’s when the coughing first started getting bad, but by then, so too did her smoking.
Watching someone suffer the effects of COPD is excruciating. You wish you could help. Of course, you always try to help by holding an arm or hand, but they shrug you away because they know they can walk up those steps, and why should they need your help to do what they’ve always been easily able to do?
Even today, I’m still ashamed to think that Mum’s death came as a great relief for all of us. And I wonder, had we known that diet could have made one iota of difference, would we have changed? It would have been such a small step.
It’s never too late to quit
Protective cells in the lungs of ex-smokers could explain why quitting smoking reduces the risk of developing lung cancer, scientists have determined.
Researchers from the Wellcome Sanger Institute, UCL and their collaborators have discovered that, compared to current smokers, people who stopped smoking had more genetically healthy lung cells, which have a much lower risk of developing into cancer.
The research, published in the journal Nature in January, is part of the £20 million Mutographs of Cancer project, a Cancer Research UK Grand Challenge initiative. The project detects DNA ‘signatures’ that indicate the source of damage, to understand the causes of cancer better and discover the ones we may not yet be aware of.
The study shows that quitting smoking could do much more than just stopping further damage to the lungs. Researchers believe it could also allow new, healthy cells to actively replenish the lining of our airways. This shift in the proportion of healthy to damaged cells could help protect against cancer.
These results highlight the benefits of stopping smoking completely, at any age.
Lung cancer kills around 9000 Australians annually and a further 1600 New Zealanders each year.
Smoking tobacco damages DNA and hugely increases the risk of lung cancer, with around 72 per cent of the 47,000 annual lung cancer cases in the UK caused by smoking.
Damage to the DNA in cells lining the lungs creates genetic errors, and some of these are ‘driver mutations’, which are changes that give the cell a growth advantage. Eventually, an accumulation of these driver mutations can let the cells divide uncontrollably and become cancerous. However, when someone stops smoking, they avoid most of the subsequent risk of lung cancer.
Studies prove diet change relief from COPD
A twin pair of studies from Columbia and Harvard Universities found that consumption of cured meat – bacon, ham, salami etc. – may increase the risk of COPD.
It’s thought to be due to the nitrate preservatives in meat, which may mimic the lung-damaging properties of the nitrate by-products of cigarette smoke, according to Dr Michael Greger.
In his book “How Not to Die,” he states that a landmark study published in 2010 demonstrated a beneficial impact on COPD patients from increased consumption of fruits and vegetables.
The three-year study found that patients following a traditional diet experienced progressive worsening, but, in contrast, disease progression was halted in the group consuming more fruits and vegetables.
Not only did their lung function not get worse, it actually improved a little, he notes.
The researchers suggested this could be due to a combination of the antioxidant and anti-inflammatory effects of the fruits and vegetables, along with a potential reduction in the consumption of meat, which is thought to act as a pro-oxidant. Whatever the mechanism, a dietary change is helpful.
