This man struggled to quit smoking until a serious health diagnosis changed everything
When he was 25 years old, Michael Foley picked up a smoking habit. “I was stupid,” he says simply. Foley tried to quit several times over the years, but it never quite managed to stick — until he got a serious health diagnosis.
“Trying to quit smoking was the hardest thing I’d ever done,” Foley tells Yahoo Lifestyle. It wasn’t until he was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), a serious lung condition that blocks airflow and makes it hard to breathe, that he finally managed to quit.
Foley first started having symptoms of COPD in his late 50s and, at the time, he was smoking two packs a day. “I had a very severe pain in my left kidney that I thought was the start of lung cancer,” he says. Foley’s mother, father, and four aunts and uncles died of lung cancer, and he says it’s something that always worried him. “My mom had all kinds of issues with her side and back from lung cancer,” he says. “Getting it was my biggest fear.”
At the same time, he also had some issues breathing, especially when it came to walking up stairs or any kind of incline, or carrying a basket of laundry. “I just thought that was due to breathing difficulties, like anyone who smokes two packs a day would have,” he says. And Foley kept on smoking. “I would just take a break when I got winded,” he says. “You have to remember, I was stupid.”
Finally, he saw his doctor, who put him through several diagnostic tests. When Foley was told that he had COPD, not lung cancer, he says he was “really relieved.” “I said, ‘Sweet! Thanks!’” he recalls. “I felt pretty good that I didn’t have lung cancer, but then I was like, ‘Oh…now I have to deal with this.’”
His doctor told him that his breathing issues will never get better. “It can only get worse,” Foley says. “That was the last time I had a cigarette.”
Now 63, Foley says his COPD definitely impacts his life. He uses a daily inhaler and has a fast-acting inhaler for emergencies. He also gets out breath doing ordinary tasks, such as raking leaves. “Because of this, I'm pretty careful with what I do and how I do it,” he says.
When shoveling snow this past winter, Foley says the entire process took him four hours to complete. “I would shovel for a few minutes and then take a coffee break. Then, I’d repeat that,” he says. “It took me half the day, but I finally got it done.”
Foley is now passionate about COPD awareness. He's joined the American Lung Association’s Patient Advisory Group, where COPD patients like him talk to researchers about the things that matter to them most when it comes to their disease. “We’re helping the doctors understand what we go through,” he says. “They soak up what we say like sponges.”
He’s also focused on trying to get other people to avoid smoking cigarettes or, if they’ve already started, to quit like he did. “I wish I could tell every kid that’s smoking that you have no idea what you’re going to experience 30 years from now,” he says. “I knew going in that smoking wasn’t good for me, but I did it anyway. It was a dumb decision. I was not the brightest star in the sky.”
Read more from Yahoo Lifestyle:
Follow us on Instagram, Facebook and Twitter for nonstop inspiration delivered fresh to your feed, every day.
