What is emphysema?

Emphysema is when your lungs get tired and can't catch air as well because they're full of little bubbles that make it hard to breathe.

Imagine your lungs are like a big sponge, when you take a breath, the sponge gets all puffy with water. But in emphysema, the sponge starts breaking into tiny pieces, like a bunch of little sponges inside one big one. Each little sponge is a bubble, and they don’t work as well together.

When you try to blow out birthday candles, your lungs normally help push the air out. But with emphysema, it's like blowing out candles through a straw, it takes more effort because the bubbles are making things harder to move around.

Smoking is one of the biggest reasons why this happens, it’s like giving your lungs a lot of tiny paper cuts over and over again. The more you smoke, the more these little bubbles grow, and the harder it becomes to breathe.

So, emphysema is just your lungs getting full of bubbles that make breathing feel like work instead of fun.