Price uses illness to snuff smoking

Ray Price spends every hour of every day harnessed by plastic tubes to an oxygen bottle.

More than five decades of smoking robbed the formerly robust, 6-foot-4-inch man of most of his lung power.

"I tell people, if you don't give up smoking, you're going to end up toting around one of these," he said, pointing to his oxygen bottle.

Price, 71, no longer spends hours enjoying his passion for golfing.

"I got to the point where I could no longer walk the course," he said. "We went to a cart, then even that became a struggle."

After a recent bout of pneumonia, Price can only walk a few feet at a time in his Whitefish apartment before emphysema takes his breath away. He relies on a Flathead County home health aide for help with showering.

But Price doesn't waste his limited breath focusing on his health problems. He uses his example to save others from the addiction that took his breath away, bit by bit, year by year.

A member of Tobacco Free Flathead, he uses his citizen power to lobby for tobacco control measures pending before the Legislature. When his health allows, he uses the power of his personal story to dissuade young people from lighting up.

Price focuses on the junior high school population because he believes he has a better shot at keeping youth from starting than stopping those addicted. He described his visits to Columbia Falls Junior High School.

"I pull into the parking lot and the principal comes out with a wheelchair and wheels me into the classroom," he said. "My oxygen tank is with me so they see it all."

Once in the classroom, he tells the students about the impact smoking has had on his life. Price spends a lot of time studying the latest research on tobacco including the impact of secondhand smoke.

He doesn't pull any punches.

"I tell them if your parents smoke, they're dumping that smoke down your lungs so you best get on their back to quit smoking," Price said.

A few parents complained, but it hasn't dampened Price's crusade to get out the truth about tobacco's toll on human health. He didn't have that information when he began smoking in the early 1940s.

"Everybody smoked," he said. "You went to the doctor's office and there were ashtrays in the waiting room. The doctors all smoked."

He remember waiting in line to buy cigarettes with his parents. Even when he had his first lung problems in about 1984, Price couldn't overcome his addiction.

He recalled when he got sick with pneumonia. When the doctor told him that he had emphysema in his lungs, he went into denial and kept on smoking.

"I got so stupid that I was taking a breathing treatment with a nebulizer and having a cigarette between treatments," Price said with a laugh.

During years as a sales representative for children's books, he and his wife Helen traveled the country in a motor home. While both smoked, Price developed a three-pack-a-day habit.

He made attempts to quit many times before finally breaking free in 1997. Helen followed suit, kicking the habit in 1999.

Price said doctors nagged him when they saw him smoking but it didn't help. Neither he nor his wife worried about lung cancer and emphysema, believing that those diseases happened to other people.

"If you're not ready to quit, it's not going to work," he said.

For Price, a steady decline in his health finally made him face that his pleasurable habit was slowly killing him. First he gave up golf, then walking up stairs, then walking much at all.

It became a vicious, downward spiral.

"I made up my mind and I talked to the doctor," he said.

Price got a starter pack for Zyban, a drug which reduces cravings, and signed up for the drug company's program.

He was impressed by the support the program provided.

"On my quit date, I got a phone call," he said. "They wanted to know how I was doing."

Price doesn't recall the experience as a nightmare. He had one relapse after quitting but he immediately went back to not smoking.

Helen took a different approach.

"I was able to cut down," she said. "It took me a year and a half to quit."

Price said that his research revealed that nicotine is more addictive than marijuana or cocaine. He said Zyban combined with a patch appears to offer the most effective aid.

While the habit seems insurmountable, the damage it inflicts as emphysema defines incurable.

"Over time, your lungs deteriorate," he said.

Some medical breakthroughs have offered hope to people like Price with emphysema. A new drug called Sirivia has vastly cut down his need to use an emergency inhaler.

He has recently started up a new course of physical therapy to try and build up some breathing capacity.

Price shuns public places in the winter to avoid catching upper respiratory viruses or infections such as the one that put him in North Valley Hospital for a week in November.

"I have about this much spare capacity in my lungs," he said with his fingers a quarter-inch apart.

He has had more trips to the emergency room than he cares to recall. Price said he couldn't describe the panic that comes over a person during an attack.

"You can't breathe and you know you have to breathe," he said. "You're not ready for the brown side of the grass."

As a born salesman, Price finds avoiding public places tough to take.

"I love going to the grocery store," he said. "I know everyone and harass everyone."

When his health allows, Price goes to the senior center in Whitefish. On the first and third Tuesdays of each month, he and Helen manage the Martin City food bank.

When homebound, Price continues his battle against tobacco use by sending off letters to legislators. Recently, he supported the right of communities to make public places, such as restaurants, smoke free.

"I rail against establishments that allow a line of smokers outside that I have to walk through to get to the door," he said. "It gags you."

Reporter Candace Chase may be reached at 758-4436 or by e-mail at cchase@dailyinterlake.com