COVID-19, COPD, and the power of stories

Editor's note: This column is part of a series featuring Lakeshore residents sharing their stories.

As the COVID pandemic rages on, we continue to hear about health care professionals caring not only for the physical needs of their patients but spending extended time with them to assess and meet their emotional needs. 

Doctors, nurses, and respiratory therapists are realizing now, more than ever, that a patient is so much more than a critically ill person wearing a hospital gown that this person is more than a body hooked up to a jumble of tubes and machines with alarms. 

As horrible as this pandemic is, in one sense, an even higher level of care seems to be emerging. Health care professionals are hearing their patient’s story, discovering the fullness of that person’s life and the story they will always have within them. 
Furthermore, hearing these stories gives us some frame of reference when the numbers — cases, hospitalizations, deaths — are so great, they can be almost impossible to understand. 

Little time to know patients

In my work as a respiratory therapist with patients who have Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease (COPD), we didn’t have much of a chance to get to know patients. They came into the acute care areas (emergency, in-patient medical/surgical or ICU) of the hospital very sick. We went to their rooms and treated them, they got better and then they went home. 


But by working with patients in pulmonary rehabilitation — some of them for at least 10 years — we got to know our patients better, hearing them tell stories of their younger days. They described things they did for fun, things that got them into trouble, things they did out of obligation, things that broke their hearts, and things that made a day the happiest day of their life. 

We got to know their families and friends who loved them dearly and who they loved back. We learned to know the wholeness of that person and that, even though at that time their body was ravaged by disease, they were much more than their illness. So much more. 

John Z.’s story

As sophisticated as our world may be, it seems like people just can’t get enough of a plain old good story, especially one with things that sound familiar. 

Some time ago, when I was writing a newsletter for lung patients in the Holland area, I wrote about John Z., a man I had met by way of our pulmonary rehab program. John had COPD and was the perfect example of excellent pulmonary management. He followed his doctor’s orders implicitly, exercised, and did all the right things. 

I thought it would be a great idea to profile John in the newsletter, holding him up as an example of how to be healthy by following so perfectly all the aspects of lung health management. As part of the story, I added a little background about John growing up with 12 siblings, and a bit about his adult life when he worked for many years as a school bus driver. 

I worked hard on the piece and thought that surely what readers would take away from my story was how John took his inhalers, exercised, and kept every appointment with this doctor. 

Revelation about relatability

One day, I was talking with a new COPD patient in our program about John Z.’s story. He had seen the newsletter but had no idea who or what I was talking about. When I was about to give up on connecting with him on this, his face lit up as he exclaimed, “Oh! You’re talking about that guy … the bus driver!” 

“Uh, yeah, that’s right,” I said. “That’s the one.”

But privately, I thought, “Are you kidding me? I wrote that profile on perfect pulmonary management and all this guy remembers is that John was a bus driver?” Then it dawned on me that people are interested in stories they can relate to — stories about real people just like themselves doing things that are identifiable and easily understood. 

We all want to be reassured that patients are seen as so much more than their disease, especially when that very ill person in the hospital bed might someday be one of us. 

Let’s pay that forward. If we take the time to not only listen to people tell their stories, but to hear them, we can discover the wholeness of those individuals. And by telling their stories, the lives of those people live on.  

Jane M. Martin, BA, CRT, is a respiratory therapist, educator, and author. She has written over 200 COPD-related articles and is the author of Live Your Life with COPD — 52 Weeks of Health, Happiness, and Hope (Second edition).