'Am I going to die?': How one man used his COPD diagnosis to change his life

Reporting by Jacquie Cosgrove

Mark Balaban’s love of working with glass started when he was 12 years old. At the time, he had a job sweeping up the floors at a local glass shop and he slowly became interested in what people around him were doing. “I was amazed in how glass was cut,” he tells Yahoo Life. “Next thing I knew, I was 17 years old and opening my own glass shop. That's where it started.”

But Balaban’s work as the owner of Showerman Glass Shop would eventually lead to serious health issues. He regularly ground glass as part of his work, and his method of working caused him to accidentally inhale fine particles of glass. “You're kind of leaning over the machine and you're grinding the glass and you'd get a puff of like fog that would come up,” Balaban explains. “And what I would do is exhale and it would blow the fog away. And when I blew it away, I would take a deep breath. And then, as the smoke would come up again, I would blow it away and then take a deep breath.”

The New Jersey native says it “never dawned on me” to put on a mask. “That would simplify things,” he says. “But that's not something that's normal in the industry.”

Balaban started developing health issues — and he initially wrote them off.

“There were times that I would come back from a job site and I would be coughing up things and I'd say, ‘Oh boy, that place was terrible.’” Balaban also noticed he would have throat irritation, wasn’t breathing properly and just didn’t feel well in general.

“These were just things that I just thought were just part of life,” he says. “Over the years, as I got older, I started realizing that there were things that were bothering me and I said, ‘Well, what am I going to do about it?’”

These were just things that I just thought were just part of life. Mark Balaban

The tipping point was when Balaban had “pneumonia after pneumonia after pneumonia.” He was hospitalized seven times in one year, each time for a period of a week. He finally saw a pulmonologist who conducted testing on his lungs. “The doctor said, ‘Wow, what do you do for a living? Because I see all this little sparkly stuff in your lungs,’” Balaban recalls. “I figured it has to be glass grit from grinding glass for so many years. I would have never changed what I did for a living but I certainly would change how I did it.”

He was diagnosed with chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. COPD is a progressive disease that makes it hard to breathe, according to the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute (NHLBI). When someone has COPD, less air flows in and out of their airways, leading to symptoms like coughing, wheezing, shortness of breath, chest tightness and other symptoms.

“Everything is better since I’ve had COPD because I’m making my life better.”

Balaban says he was floored by his diagnosis. “I asked the doctor straight out: ‘Am I going to die?’” he says. “And the doctor said, we're all going to die someday, but you're not going to die anytime soon.”

The glass shop owner’s doctor told him he would to learn how to live with his disease, and that included making some big changes. Balaban was put on supplemental oxygen to help his breathing, and he now exercises regularly. He also does deep breathing exercises and is careful about what he breathes in.

I asked the doctor straight out: ‘Am I going to die?’ Mark Balaban

“I'm very, very careful not to breathe dust, not to breathe anything in my shop and especially cleansers at home,” says Balaban. And, when he needs to be in the workshop at his business, Balaban asks everyone to momentarily stop grinding glass.

His diagnosis also inspired him to make workplace changes for his employees. “They have rules they have to follow now, whether they like it or not,” Balaban says. For example, he now requires his employees to wear a mask before they grind glass. “There’s positivity that can come out of it and what my employees are doing now is protecting themselves from becoming me.”

Balaban says it took a year and a half to feel like himself again. “I’ve been on oxygen for the last two years and I find myself hardly using it now,” he adds. Now, he says, “I feel better, I taste my food better… Everything is better since I’ve had COPD because I’m making my life better.”

When he was first diagnosed with COPD, Balaban was worried that his life was over. “It’s not,” he says. “I’m not letting it stop me from living.”