 Like many people with emphysema, I had always been an active person before the disease started slowing me down. I was a runner and also did long distance biking. I'm retired now but in my career years as a CPA and CFO, I worked in a nursing facility and was always running around. I'd been a smoker for a long time but was already down to one or two cigarettes a day, trying to quit, when my pulmonologist diagnosed me with emphysema in June of 0000. That was it...I quit for good that day. I was no stranger to the symptoms of this disease. My husband also suffers from COPD and my father died of emphysema. My dad had struggled with the excessive coughing, but in the early years of my diagnosis I only had the shortness of breath. It did cause me a great deal of anxiety. I did a lot of research online because I had a hard time understanding why my symptoms were so different from my dad's. I wondered if it was my heart, but it was definitely my lungs. To combat the symptoms, I tried various inhalers, though none of them worked that great for me. I only used oxygen sometimes, but I did need it to exercise or recover from a cold. The disease was slowly wearing me down. I couldn't walk very far anymore. I'm an artist and I love to go to the Art Institute in Chicago, but it's quite large and requires a lot of walking  -  I just couldn't do it anymore. One of my studio art classes became difficult to attend because I had to park so far away. It was getting to the point where I was going to have to give that up too and the thought of that was heartbreaking. I was online one day and the link to the Zephyr Valve page popped up. I called my doctor immediately and he gave me a referral to Dr. Desai. I went to see him in December and had the procedure two months later. There was no hesitation because I figured I had to try it, especially with it being non-invasive. 