How This Busy Restaurateur Learned to Cope with COPD

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My name’s Sean Cummings, and I have COPD.

You can get all caught up in right now and, once again, be afraid for the next 20 years or whatever, until something happens. But a lot of people that get a chronic disease or chronic illness, once they’re told that, they think it’s a death sentence. And it’s really not.

What it is just telling you what we already know—that sooner or later, it’s going to happen. Now this doesn’t mean it’s in five years, 10 years, or 20, and if we really have watched other people in life, nobody knows. Literally nobody knows, so I’m not going to buy into that. I have to buy into right now, I’m healthy. It’s great. My kids are all not in prison. They have a full set of teeth. I mean, they’re all pretty nice, good human beings. I’m happy with them. I mean, that’s what I got to be joyful about. I mean, I’ve got a pretty solid life. The bad thing is that every once in a while, I can’t breathe.

I think the best way for me to stay hopeful is, I go back to this mantra of, are we going to live in hope or are we going to live in fear? What do you want to do do? You want to look at today for being the best thing that’s going to be, Or you want to start off and look at today for the worst it’s going to be? Because we’re going to have dishes of both, right? We’re going to have a dish of both.

There’s an Indian saying that goes, Do you want to feed the angry dog, or do you want to feed the good dog? It’s our choice. Where do you put your energy? Because I’ve got to have energy for one. I don’t have enough energy for both. I only have so much energy in storage every day, and literally it’s about four hard hours and then I can do four other ones about medium. And when we get to that point, I literally have to lay down somewhere and go to sleep.

And that’s what I do, knowing full well that’s the deal. In about 30 minutes I can get up and do whatever needs to be finished. But with the way my body works right now, I just take naps throughout the day. Anytime I need them, I just stop and take a nap. And everybody I work with knows it. I tell you, what I find valuable for me—and I know a other people, they don’t frown on it, they think it’s funny or cheesy—is I do meditation in the morning and then I do prayer. Now the prayer I do is just a repetitive, over and over and over again, the same thing. And I find that works for me to take my mind out to whatever I’m on.

Meditation, there’s a couple of different things that I do: breathing, where I can breathe in a color and breathe out a color, and it feels like it can get rid of inflammation with that, and it seems to work. The other one is, literally, I will lay down on the ground and I run my hands over myself as if it’s an X-ray machine, and I say, I need the white light of Jesus Christ to heal this tissue. And I’ll move it all through my body and then out through my feet. I’ll push out whatever negative energy, whatever sludge I feel is in my body. And I just do that over and over and over again, till my body, to me, feels like it’s clean.

And you know what you’re going to do is just get out of bed. And the biggest thing that I would say for other people is, you know, if you want to feel lousy, set a timer. 15 minutes and go. I’ll feel lousy for 15 minutes. And when that 15 minutes is up, you got to get up and get going. What ends up happening is you’re just not getting enough oxygen to your muscles. So nothing feels good, and it makes you think, I’ll just curl up here and die. And that’s just not what I do. I do a 15-minute deal and get rolling.

What I think the most helpful thing is that I do, dealing with COPD, is so, I have a regimen. I get up. I meditate. I do some form of workout. I think these are two really important things, because a lot of times you just don’t want to get out of bed in the morning. Prayer, meditation workout. And I eat, literally, like a diet that’s friendly to it. For some reason or another, if I eat a whole bunch of white flour and stuff, it inflames it—I have no idea why, but it inflames it. And the other thing is that I monitor my body a little bit better, and look out for what is, or is not, affecting me. And emotionally, it can trigger this stuff as well. So you really got to worry about how deep I want to get into other people’s problems, you know? If people are around me that are negative, I buy into their negativity. If people are around me that are positive, I buy into their positivity. So I have to be around positive people. I can’t afford to slide back on that negative thing.