Tom Jupp wants to get something off his chest: the guy who seems to be sitting on it.
“It’s like somebody is sitting on your chest 24 hours a day,” he says in describing what it feels like to have emphysema.
Jupp, a 53-year-old Mississaugan, had a normal life until a year ago when a sudden attack landed him in Credit Valley Hospital (CVH). Since then he’s been hospitalized several more times, had to go on long-term disability from his job of nearly three decades at Atomic Energy of Canada Limited in Clarkson and has learned a whole new way of breathing (and not through his eyelids like Nuke LaLoosh, the Tim Robbins character in Bull Durham).
On Wednesday, Jupp was exhibit A in explaining the need for the new COPD program at CVH.
If you are like me, you are not familiar with the term COPD (Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease.) It is the name under which emphysema, chronic bronchitis and other lung diseases are now grouped.
When CVH opened its new ambulatory care and cancer centre in June 2005, it said that more good things would follow, such as the opening and expansion of a number of clinics to serve community needs. This is a prime example.
Jupp had to spend six weeks away from his friends and family in Toronto’s West Park Hospital (once the old TB Sanitorium), learning the exercise and breathing techniques that will help him deal with a debilitating condition that can leave its victims breathless and hopeless.
“It’s phenomenal for us to have this,” says Debbie Coutts, co-ordinator of the program and a CVH employee since 1986. “There’s been a big void with this patient population.”
A diagnosis and a referral from a physician now provides patients with the opportunity to take part in a 10-week program where they not only exercise and learn how to control their disease, but they meet a lot of other patients fighting the same battle they are. Psychological support is a big issue for many of the patients, often ex-smokers in their 60s.
It should be noted that Mississauga’s GlaxoSmithKline has played a big role in financing this clinic, and many more across the province through its PRIISME (pronounced Prism) program, which encourages collaborative management of asthma, diabetes and COPD within communities.
To find out what COPD sufferers feel, you can give yourself this test: Take a deep breath and exhale half-way. Inhale again and breathe out half-way. That gives you the sensation of living without enough oxygen.
The major diagnostic tool for COPD is a spirometry test. By typing your birth date and weight into a computerized unit and then getting you to take a big breath and blow a mouthpiece for six seconds and then take another deep breath, testers can figure out your airflow.
Volunteers could take the short-cut version of the test Wednesday. Learned this from the experience: continuing to blow when there is no more air in your lungs makes one very, very dizzy.
One of those taking advantage was Mississauga West MPP Bob Delaney who aced his test twice (no hot air jokes please). He praised the new clinic as a place where sufferers can acquire the tools they need to go home and lead a normal life.
“Life has not come to an end,” he told the opening celebration. “This disease doesn’t control you, you can control it.”
Poster boy Tom Jupp agrees. He is now back cutting his lawn, although it takes him three hours to do it.
What about shovelling snow?
“I bought a snow blower,” he laughs, “and I taught my son how to use it.”
