Alveoli: Endings in our bodies

I embraced my father’s death from lung cancer related to smoking with what could have been to relatives an inspiring acceptance, instead of my turning into a firebrand against the habit. I had by then, quite a sizeable cache of ammunition aimed at still a billion smokers, among them pregnant women, relentless warnings of its deadliness—think not only of the addictive nicotine, its hook, and sticky tar, but apparently also 7,000 other poisonous chemicals—no matter, and ordinances that make it challenging, if not impossible, to smoke in public; while the number of smokers have diminished in some reports, it’s somehow refilled with the rise of e-(electronic) cigarettes and smokeless tobacco use, both known to contain as much nicotine and other chemicals.

Is it panache once synonymous only with character actors, morphed into “just cool” these days, which has deadened the horrors of smoking? Or possibly, warnings have not been graphic enough to frighten especially the young, they, who, might one day wake to a dawn wracked by an all-night no-phlegm cough, like my father’s—how casual the lurking destruction began; he had smoked three packs daily, a chain of lit tips from his youth, eventually, cold-turkey-ed, and showing no sign of the unseen darkness swarming in him.

Where and how in his chest did the phantom chisel life off him? Literally, in endings called, alveoli, something I learned in a Basic Anatomy class, which the teacher, a doctor, illustrated with this image: “Each cigarette stick bursts three alveoli.” It had so struck me that I sprinted to find an encyclopedia, wanting to learn more about this mellifluous sounding body part, flipping pages under the heading, lungs—for me, the wing-like, spongy organ afloat in our chest cavity, cradling the heart on its left side.

Indeed, at the ends of the lungs’ intricate branching air passageways, clustered like micro-sized wet grapes, though really more like elastic cavities in shifting shapes, sheathed in thin cells, and wrapped in a filigree of veins— there, our alveoli, normally 300 million of them; through their thin walls, inhaled oxygen passes to the surrounding capillaries, flowing into the heart and on to 60,000 miles of blood vessels per second, while carbon dioxide, moves to the air sacs to be exhaled.

So what if they burst, one of my classmates had asked. Our teacher explained it with a plastic balloon, which with fingers we press the ends where it bursts, creating a hardened scar, such that with less air volume, might not lift as high any longer; alveoli, too, when these burst due to air pressure caused by tar deposit, apparently don’t regenerate, hence, with millions of other microscopic parts of the body’s coronary and systemic circulatory systems affected, it’s easy to figure what happens.

I know: Within a week since that dry cough, my father shriveled from a rather noble figure into a crumpled clump of skin, holding in place bones that shifted restlessly as if someone tried to rearrange them. He had been diagnosed with pleurisy (fluid in the lung’s coating) a week before, cleared by Manila Doctors’ Hospital, and sent home. Five mornings later, he had turned into a stranger with bulging eyes from liquids trapped in his failing system; it turned out his pleurisy merely veiled the cancer, which snuffed him out that evening at the ICU.

I realized then, how our teacher had simplified the lesson on lungs— it’s far more complex than we could have possibly grasped—but he stunned our class so much so that a few began wrestling with their addiction. Still, I must confess how I once viewed smoking through a kind of colonial gothic romance. Like when Virginia Slims became synonymous with sophistication, I could not relate to it—instead, it scooped me back to a summer in my grade school years, when flue-cured Virginia tobacco stirred an ageing tobacco industry, which apparently remains a cash crop in the Ilocos.

I recall how our neighborhood at the camino real in Bacarra, suddenly buzzed with a new venture that lured young women and a few of my playmates to string leaves through the ribs in a stick with a tin cone at one end (agtudok) in a sun-dappled shed in Lola Nena’s backyard. Tobacco leaves like those in Alice’s Wonderland so fascinated me, I would slip past my dozing grandmother when my mother was away on teaching demonstrations, and attempted to string on all-thumbs to earn a nickel, too, ignorant of risks like getting downed by “green tobacco” sickness, which dermal absorption of nicotine from wet leaves caused; broncho pneumonia did, nonetheless, and got me barred from the shed.

It’s such thrill that must have enfeebled my views on smoking, as well, gothic images of fat clouds from dinubla crowning ancient trees, like the noxious bangar, known for a kapre, which young aunts conjured on moonlit nights. Today, as I unravel more mysteries in our body— fathomless in its perfection—I cringe at the memory, and vow, instead, to seize any chance to stun any one, using my teacher’s trumpet-blow on the alveoli.