Pulmonary Emphysema

Your lung is losing its structure. The walls between the air sacs dissolve, the fine partitions that normally ensure efficient gas exchange disappear — and in their place arise large, functionless voids. Medically, emphysema is the breakdown of lung tissue: less surface area, less elasticity, less capacity to absorb oxygen. The lung becomes larger and emptier at once.

That is a strange contradiction: more volume, less function. Inflated, but powerless. The lung expands — and yet can do less. It is as though a room keeps growing larger, but simultaneously loses its furniture, its walls, its structure, until you stand in a vast hall in which nothing is within reach any longer.