EVERETT – Bob Neumann doesn’t look like a cheerleader, not with his silver hair and a gray T-shirt that says “Breathe!”
Kevin Nortz / The Herald
That’s what he is, though: a 59-year-old cheerleader.
“Two pounds or three?” Neumann asked a patient in a recent pulmonary rehabilitation class at Providence Everett Medical Center.
“Two? That’s fine,” he said as he brought a pair of hand weights to a woman lined up for the exercise session.
Neumann suffers from severe emphysema. He’s a regular user of oxygen. In 1997, he underwent lung volume reduction surgery.
After his diagnosis in 1995, he was forced to leave his job as a structural mechanic on the wing line at Everett’s Boeing plant. Back then, Neumann said, a doctor at Seattle’s Harborview Medical Center told him he had less than six months to live.
The easy thing would have been to stay at home near Everett’s Silver Lake and give up.
The easy thing wasn’t for Neumann. For seven years, he’s been a volunteer four days a week with the hospital’s pulmonary rehab program.
“I’ve never seen a person so faithful and committed to serving others. He’s my right-hand man,” said Rebecca Rose, a registered nurse and respiratory therapist who leads the program.
“So many of our clients get a bad diagnosis. If Bob is here to give one of his pep talks, they think, ‘If he can do it, I can do it.’”
The doctor-prescribed classes meet several times a week in a small gym in the medical office building adjacent to the hospital’s Colby campus. About 24 patients are in the program, eight in each class. Neumann assists with equipment and helps Rose record heart rates and other statistics.
The nurse puts patients through a mild exercise regime, using hand and ankle weights, treadmills and stationary bicycles. They hold yardsticks as they begin with stretching movements. Some need a flow of oxygen during the session.
After the workout, Rose gives classroom instruction in staying as healthy as possible while managing emphysema, asthma, pulmonary fibrosis and other lung ailments. A recent topic was how to cough properly.
” ‘Cheerleader’ is the perfect word,” Greg Lawson, supervisor of the hospital’s Center for Cardiovascular Pulmonary Rehab and Prevention, said of Neumann.
“A lot of people are referred to pulmonary rehab, and they’re not sure what it’s all about,” Lawson said. “A health care provider can recommend it, and we can provide all the statistics. But it helps to have someone who’s gone through it. He’s a living example.”
Neumann is an example of perseverance despite chronic lung disease. A long way from cured, he needs medication through a nebulizer after the exercise portion of the program is finished.
Linda Olson-Kovacs of Mukilteo has been through the rehab classes three times. At 57, she has emphysema and asthma. Once a heavy smoker, she quit cigarettes a year ago. “Lately, I’ve been on oxygen all the time,” she said.
“When I started this program, a doctor told me I had two to three years to live,” Olson-Kovacs said. “I wondered why I was quitting smoking, why I was doing all this. When I see Bob’s face, he’s an inspiration. Now, I’m up to five years.”
Lawson, whose training is in exercise physiology, said the classes won’t reverse lung disease. Instead, patients report improved quality of life.
“That’s difficult to measure,” Lawson said. “They may be able to walk to the mailbox without getting short of breath, or they’re not as self-conscious about taking their oxygen with them.”
The other goal is reducing the number of hospitalizations, he said.
Visiting the class would be a sobering experience for smokers. “The majority of cases are a result of long-term smoking,” Lawson said.
Certainly, smoking was Neumann’s story. “I smoked three packs of Camels a day from age 12 or 14 until I was 48,” he said.
With his wife, Judy, still working for Boeing, Neumann handles much of the housework. But he tires easily and takes his oxygen with him when he uses stairs. In December 1997, the upper lobes of his lungs on both sides were removed during surgery at the University of Washington Medical Center.
Holding his chest, he said the sensation when he’s active is “like it’s all wet in here.”
None of that stops him from showing up Mondays through Thursdays for several hours each time, to work with Rose and encourage others. By being there, Neumann helps himself, too.
“If I wasn’t volunteering, I’d be a patient,” he said.
Herald Writer Julie Muhlstein: 425-339-3460 or muhlsteinjulie@heraldnet.com.
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