Quote:
Originally Posted by Rumpelteazer
My mother has chronic bronchitis and when she has a cold she has to be careful to take her medicines and still she regularly (every 1 to 2 years) she either almost gets a pneumonia or fully gets one.
On Saturday she started getting a cold and although she coughed a lot and felt tired she was okay until this morning. When she could hardly breathe, her inhaler didn't help and she had my father call an ambulance. She was put on a ventilator, I don't know if they gave her anything. After a while the ventilator had helped a lot and they called our doctor to see if he wanted to see her or if he preferred to have her taken to the hospital. He wanted to see her and he had time to do it right then. So the ambulance crew left, my father got the car and my parents are now at the doctor.
She was diagnosed with chronic bronchitis at a young age, but my grandmother and doctor didn't tell her. It was convenient for my grandmother; she kept my mother home, because my mother "didn't have long to live", my mother had to do the housekeeping and was sent to work at age 16. She didn't find out until she was in her 30s that she had bronchitis, when she found it harder to breathe and our current doctor told her and put her on medication. He was horrified she never knew.
Am I worried, sure. But most of all I'm angry. She smokes unfiltered cigarettes, quite a lot IMHO (and she also has high blood pressure). Over the last couple of years she has reduced the number of cigarettes she smokes, but with her health issues any cigarette is one too many. Also, when she has a cold she smokes more, because it suppresses the coughing, or so she says.
As children we begged her to stop. I don't know why she doesn't want to stop; if it's a middle finger to her mother and then doctor, if it's her way of keeping in control or because she afraid she can't stop. I wished she was taken to the hospital. I assume our doctor has told her numerous times to stop, maybe if she was taken to the hospital and got a lecture about smoking there it would be a wake up call. Probably not though, but you never know.
Now, for next month or month and a half I will not only be working pretty much full time, I'll also be responsible for the house keeping and have to do also those pesky chores my mother hates doing (thawing and cleaning the freezer, deep clean the kitchen, etc).
|
Mom is partially right on the cough suppression.
A few years ago, there was a science fair at a college. One group was testing lung capacity (called something else). They had an idea to show how bad smoking is on your lungs. The idea was to take a reading on a smoker before they went out and smoked a cigarette. Then take another immediately after a cigarette. The results had us all looking for a respiratory therapist or the professor. The capacity was increased immediately after a cigarette. 30 minutes later was when the capacity dropped back down. I was the guinea pig in that experiment.