Becky H.: COPD at 45, a Collapse Leaving Work, and a Life Tethered to Oxygen

Becky began smoking as a high school exchange student in Germany. Some of her host family and new friends smoked, and she started so she would fit in. She went on to college in Ohio and to law school, aiming to work as a public defender. Her story is one of CDC's Tips From Former Smokers campaign.

Warnings she didn't want to hear

For years she had bouts of bronchitis and a nagging cough. She tried to quit and couldn't, though her doctors warned her about the harm; by her own account, she simply didn't want to hear it. At 45 she was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) — a lung disease that makes breathing steadily harder. She kept smoking.

By 2012 she was often out of breath and drained of energy: she couldn't swim or keep up with her children, and felt slower than molasses. One evening, leaving work, she couldn't catch her breath. Frightened, she called 911; paramedics gave her oxygen, and the next thing she remembered was waking in the intensive care unit.

A lung specialist told her she would need a lung transplant — news she said floored her. Even then she kept taking the occasional puff, until it became obvious to her that cigarettes were going to kill her. Having already lost so much to them, she refused to let them finish the job, and quit for good. When a craving came, she would tell herself that today she chose not to smoke.

Living on oxygen

She left her job to focus on pulmonary rehabilitation, an intensive program for people with breathing problems that can include:

• learning to manage the lung condition;
• energy-saving techniques and breathing strategies;
• exercise training;
• nutritional counseling;
• counseling or group support.

She stayed smoke-free but needed continuous oxygen everywhere she went — which she valued for the freedom it gave her to get up and do things rather than stay in bed. Her deepest regret was what COPD put her children through: not the childhood, or the teenage years, she had pictured for them.

She urged anyone with symptoms of COPD to see a doctor, and when strangers asked about her oxygen tank, she told them plainly that it helped her breathe — and that she needed it because she had smoked. Becky died of COPD in 2023, at 62.

Free help to quit

Sources

Based on "Becky H.'s Story," Tips From Former Smokers, Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, including the campaign's videos with Becky; a work of the United States government in the public domain; rewritten in hubnx's own words.