COPD: A Reality Check

In researching life after smoking, I came across the very hard-hitting story of Mike Anderson, who quit smoking after forty years, because his doctor told him to "quit or die." He developed COPD. In the comments to his story I saw a recommendation for reflexology. In another avenue of research, I read that five years after quitting smoking, women are no more likely to develop cervical cancer than nonsmokers, so that's something to look forward to. I had no idea what COPD was, so what else could I do but Google it?

You can go to COPD.com to read about it, but I'm going to highlight what I care about:
What is it? Chronic Obstructive Pulmonary Disease. Emphysema and bronchitis fall under this condition. Basically, the cilia in your lungs harden, shrivel and stop functioning very very slowly, making your life miserable. The older we get, the more likely we are to get it (as with most things), but women are more vulnerable than men. The site says only half of the people who have it are actually diagnosed, and 66% (9,900,000) of those people are women. I'm thinking this can be blamed on the harmful exposure factor; I dare say, far more women house clean with brain-melting chemicals more often than men are exposed to asbestos, charcoal, etc.
The most interesting statistic: At least 75% of those diagnosed are smokers. What sucks the most is that the damage smoking causes is permanent. Sure, people can exercise, improve lung function, and do what they can, but what's done is done.

In a way, I'm lucky, because I've only got three years of less than ten cigarettes a day on my lungs. Mike Anderson has forty years of two packs a day. Some people feel they're too far gone. They have this defeatist mentality of "I've already signed my death warrant" so quitting seems futile. There are no take-backs, sure, but there's this thing called the snowball effect. When we were small and made mistakes, it didn't make us bad people. Sure, we hit each other, and called each other names, and probably did some really stupid things. I think we do harm, whether to others or ourselves, because we don't know any better. But we learn from our mistakes and move on. To refuse to quit smoking out of some kind of self-pitying stigma that it's broke and not fixable is to say that if you fuck up once, you're forever doomed to fuck up. Which seems like the kind of thing an angsty teenager who wears trench coats and eyeliner on his forehead might say. Don't get mad goth kids, I used to be that guy, too. Then I grew up. So what I'm coming to realize is that in every smoker is a masochistic emo kid. What percentage of ourselves, or themselves, that kid is is absolutely a choice. If we have control over anything in our lives, it's our attitude. Why not have a good one?