This will likely be my final update on my health progress and this crazy debacle my family doc set off. I said I update after I saw the specialist so here it is.

So, I had the appointment that the ER doc set up for me about 10 days back. It was at a department in the local hospital called the RAM, or Rapid Access Medical clinic. It's a handy dandy place with basically at least one of every kind of specialist available there, Pulm's, internal med specs, oncologists, ENT's you name it and you don't have to wait the average 4 or 5 months to see a specialist this way. The appointment took about 45 minutes and was very thorough and complete. As he was listening to my chest for breath and heart sounds I realilsed that he was the first doctor I'd seen about this trouble to bother to actually listen to my chest sounds. This includes 3 trips to ER and 2 trips to my family physician. Kind of funny actually....not funny ha ha though since you'd think it might be one of the first things they'd do.
So apparently the chest pains, which were my first indicator that something was wrong were the result of the infection/bronchitis setting in and were the muscles in my chest wall and between the ribs getting annoyed because the had pressure on them and from being forced to work harder because of the swelling. Then as the lung trouble was brewing I quit smoking which caused my already angry lungs to start their motor back up thereby causing the constriction and weighty chest feeling I felt in my chest for 3 full weeks and which only started to go away about 8 or 9 days ago. He didn't see any point in doing lung function tests until I'm fully healed from this current problem, something he expects may take another 2 to 4 weeks to be back to 100% from for the bronchitis and then as much another 6 months for my lungs to have recovered from the acute effects of inhaling poison and being scortched on a daily basis.
Through his discussion with me and the things we talked about, it seems most likely that the extra money brought in by my taking in a roommate which allowed my smoking to go from a rationed 3/4 of a pack a day average but occaisionally also broke and 2 or 3 cigarrettes a day for a few days until payday, to a steady diet of 20-30 cigs a day. It seems likely that this is what precipitated the bronchitis.

Anyways, for the last 8 or 9 days I've been getting better on a daily basis. Each day feeling like I have more lung space, each day breathing more freely. Actually by the end of the work day yesterday, although a bit sore still my lungs felt like they were breathing normal for the first time since this debacle started. I was so happy and relieved I could have just about cried.

The clinic is set to call me back in 4 weeks about the lung function tests at which time I'll go by what I feel like then on whether I will bother with them or not. If, as I hope, I go back to what I was before the bronchitis or perhaps maybe even better since I'm not smoking now, then I doubt I will bother taking up the clinics time and resources since my wind and physical abilities were good before the bronchitis. Good enough that I could outwork most of the 25 year olds at the warehouse. This COPD question was not raised because of my abilities or lack of them but mainly because of my family doctors jumping the gun and giving me a diagnosis based on just an xray when my lungs were swollen and inflamed. It was this that started all this worry in the first place. He should have just kept his mouth shut until he knew what was actually going on. Unfortunately when a doctor tells you something, looks you straight in your face and tells you you have xyz or whatever, you tend to take his word for it. Pariticularly so because I knew little to nothing about it and when combined with the then mysterious lung trouble I was having seemed plausable.