“Logic will never replace love,” says the narrator in the opening moments of ” Remembering Leonard Nimoy: His Life, Legacy and Battle with COPD,” a new documentary about the end of the famous “Star Trek” actor’s life. Nimoy had lived out the motto of his most famous character, Spock, to “live long and prosper,” dying at age 83 of chronic obstructive pulmonary disease.
This touching look at Nimoy’s life — and death as a result of COPD — was created by his daughter Julie Nimoy and her fiancé David Knight, not only as a tribute to Nimoy and his towering presence in 20th century culture, but also as a warning to others about the dangers of COPD.
Unlike a common cold, which will eventually go away, COPD is chronic and progressive. There is no cure, and in most patients, it’s the result of many years of smoking. You can manage it, but it’ll never go away completely, and for many patients and their families, that can be an emotionally difficult diagnosis.
[See: 7 Lifestyle Tips to Manage Your Asthma.]
Dr. Frederick Wamboldt, co-director of the center for health promotion and professor of medicine at National Jewish Health in Denver, says the emotional impacts of a COPD diagnosis “are many. Any type of illness that’s a chronic illness is an insult. We all like to think we’re healthy, and when we get something that can’t be fixed it’s an insult.”
Wamboldt says there are three key factors that make a COPD diagnosis so difficult for many patients to adjust to. The first is that most people who get COPD do because they smoked. “So there can be both an element of social stigma and self-blame that goes along with COPD,” he says.
Nimoy gave an interview to Piers Morgan on CNN in 2014 in which he described how heavy a smoker he was. “I was an Olympic championship smoker. If there’d been a championship for smoking, I could have qualified. I could smoke in the shower. I could smoke anyplace.” Although he gave up smoking 30 years prior to being diagnosed, he still suffered for his heavy habit, a fact that Nimoy said felt “unfair. I quit a long time ago!” But he continued, “I damaged lung cells many years ago, and then as age begins to damage lung cells as well, you begin to feel it. It’s something that can sneak up on you later.”
And while we know today that smoking is bad for health, “he got into smoking when he was young,” Julie told U.S. News. “At that time, even doctors were smoking and weren’t aware how addictive it can be. It’s just really sad that a lot of people fell into it.” Few people realized how dangerous cigarette smoke was back then, and the stigma associated with the debilitating health benefits that result so many years later is misplaced, but still something COPD patients often face.
Secondly, as the disease progresses, it becomes harder and harder to hide the illness. “One of the key therapies down the line is wearing oxygen,” Wamboldt says. “That really compounds the insult, because having something across our face that says publicly that we have this illness, most people find that troubling.”
Nimoy was publicly “outed” as having COPD after a paparazzo snapped a picture of him in a wheelchair at the Los Angeles airport while wearing supplemental oxygen. That photo shot round the world and drew attention to his condition and the disease in general. Rather than shrink away from the spotlight, Nimoy used his fame as a platform from which to tell others about the disease and what to watch out for. But not every patient has the resources or wherewithal to be comfortable with “going public” about his or her condition. Wamboldt says many patients say oxygen is a “useful tool that lets them do more,” but often strangers will approach them and accuse them of having smoked, which can discourage them from wanting to leave the house at all.
[See: 7 Things You Didn’t Know About Lung Cancer.]
The third and most distressing part of living with COPD, Wamboldt says, is having to adjust to the constant panic that being breathless can induce in many people. He says that most patients can learn to live with pain, but you “really can’t learn to live without air and the ability to breathe.”
Because breathing and being able to take in air is the most fundamental aspect of staying alive, Wamboldt says that “across the span of evolution, we’ve developed all kinds of reflexes to protect our breathing that work very much under the radar screen.” Similar to how your nervous system will detect and pull your hand away from a hot surface before you even realize you’ve touched it, Wamboldt says, “it’s become increasingly clear we have a very similar set of primitive reflexes designed to protect our breathing. They get activated in many people with chronic breathing problems and patients with COPD,” which can lead to a constant state of panic.
Living in a constant state of panic is not healthy, and it will interfere with many aspects of life. This constant triggering of the “fight or flight” response can cause a complex cascade of hormones to be released, and these chemical changes in the body can become a factor in additional health problems such as heart attack, stroke, elevated blood pressure, weight gain, anxiety and depression.
A large, observational study of more than 35,000 COPD patients published in the journal Chest in 2010 noted that 16.2 percent of patients with severe COPD also had depression or anxiety disorders. Another 2010 study of 1,200 people published in the journal Thorax found that having COPD increased a person’s risk for developing depression or anxiety by 85 percent. This second study noted that the sources of this anxiety can come not just from an inability to breathe comfortably, but also from an inability to fulfill expected duties and other concerns. “Cigarette smoking, which is the primary cause of COPD, has also been strongly linked to anxiety symptoms,” the study reports. And some of the medications patients are prescribed can actually cause anxiety as a side effect. The study concludes, “Once anxiety develops among COPD patients, it is related to poorer health outcomes.”
Wamboldt says COPD patients can benefit from antidepressants, and doctors are more readily prescribing them these days, in part because the psychological impact of a COPD diagnosis is being more widely recognized and addressed than it once was.
In addition to coping with the physical changes associated with COPD, as the disease progresses, certain lifestyle changes will also inevitably follow. For Nimoy and his family, it was the vacation home on Lake Tahoe that became untenable. Because Lake Tahoe sits above 6,200 feet elevation — more than a mile up, where the air is thinner and breathable oxygen is less abundant — going to his favorite place became harder and harder. In the film, several family members comment that having to let go of Tahoe was one of the hardest parts of the disease for them. Not just because they all loved going there, but also because it signaled a decline in Nimoy’s heath that would not be regained.
[See: 16 Ways Your Body Adjusts to a New Climate.]
“Toward the end of his life he had to sell the house and couldn’t be there without oxygen to help him breathe at altitude. It was just too high for him,” Julie says. “That was heartbreaking for him and the family because we couldn’t enjoy family gatherings up there anymore. It was his place of solitude and solace and taking time for himself and his wife, it really took a toll on him later on in life when he was really getting sick.”
Although a COPD diagnosis can be a scary thing, it’s important to speak with your doctor about issues you’re facing and emotional problems that come up. Doctors are equipped to cope with the emotional side of this progressive disease and can refer you to a specialist, prescribe antidepressants or other medications or direct you or your family to a support group that will help you sort through the issues. No doubt the world’s most famous Vulcan would agree — suffering in silence would be “highly illogical.”
Editor’s note: The film “Remembering Leonard Nimoy: His Life, Legacy and Battle with COPD” will be distributed to PBS stations around the country later this year by American Public Television.
More from U.S. News
7 Lifestyle Tips to Manage Your Asthma
7 Things You Didn’t Know About Lung Cancer
16 Ways Your Body Adjusts to a New Climate
What’s the Emotional Impact of COPD? originally appeared on usnews.com
