I was noting the recent death of Peter Jennings, the anchorman who had lung cancer, and wondering what my next strategy would be to convince my parents to quit smoking.
It occurred to me that I’ve never heard of someone suddenly getting lung cancer six months after they started smoking. Maybe it does happen, but all the cases I’ve heard about were from someone smoking for a fairly long time.
Can you, in fact, get lung cancer right off the bat, or must you smoke for an extended period of time?
Also take note that many have smoked crazy amounts of cigarettes their whole lives without getting cancer.
Smoking is a factor that raises one’s odds of getting cancer, it isn’t a certainty, and is affected by many other factors, some probably unknown. Given a large enough population you will find some who have never smoked or smoked very little getting lung cancer and some folks who suck down coffin nails one after the other until they are hit by a bus at age 102. My own grandmother is still kicking after many years of smoking and some family members take this as evidence that smoking doesn’t cause cancer but they neglect to consider my grandfather who died not long afte he retired with (though not specifically of) lung cancer. No conclusive proof but I think it is safe to say that years of cowboy killers and Bull Durham was a contributing factor.
You don’t have to smoke at ALL to get lung cancer. It’s not a direct causative agent.
Smoking does make it more LIKELY for you to get lung cancer. It also can cause other health issues. Smoking makes you less healthy than you would be if you didn’t smoke; it takes longer to get over a cold, for instance.
Somewhere-- of course, not where I can find it handily-- is a really good list of the cumulative effects after you quit smoking, starting with the first few days and continuing out to years later (i.e. after a certain number of years of not smoking, your risk of lung cancer drops to the same as someone who has never smoked. In effect, it’s like you get your “smoking virginity” back.)
Apparently you’ve been hounding your folks to quit for some time, but nobody is really going to quit FOREVER without being motivated to do so. In fact, just writing this post makes me want to go burn one. :smack:
But have you considered asking them to participate in the Great American Smokeout (1 day without smoking) or to quit smoking for, say, a month? I personally would be a lot more willing to quit “just for a month” for someone I loved-- and at the end of the month, you’ll have some concrete evidence of how much better they felt*, and so on, which you can use to ask them to quit then, or later. Even if you only convince them to quit for that one month, you are still helping them physically.
Best of luck!
Corr
*By the way, there is some evidence that nicotine acts as a bit of an anti-depressant; if quitting smoking causes adverse mental or physical changes, one should see a doctor. Quitting smoking may not make you feel better right away, or for some time.
Dear Rick,
Years ago a friend asked the same question. I still have the message I sent him. It’s not formatted or punctuated properly, I was feeling pretty raw when I typed it. He showed it to his father. I don’t know if he still smokes.
Jim
I wish I had pictures of my Mom sitting in all kinds of contorted positions. Positions she had to assume because lung cancer had ravaged her body so bad she could not sit like a normal person without experiencing severe pain. Night after night my dad laid in bed with his eyes open because he could not sleep due to his wife moaning in agony. After months of excruciating pain and coughing up parts of pinkish brown lung tissue she had succumb to the terror that cigarettes have to offer. Finally, in her early fifties her lungs no longer capable of supplying needed oxygen to her body her agony ended. Interesting juxtaposition, in the beginning cigarettes made her feel good. Look what they did in the end.
I remember talking with my Mom's radiologist. She told me that over 95% of all the lung cancer patients she sees started smoking in their teens. If they would have stopped before any adverse effects took hold, that within five years their bodies would be no more susceptible to cancer than a non smoker.
My father, shortly after his wife died had succumb to the same dreadful fate. Years of smoke took its toll on both of them. What a waste. In the end my Dad a grown man laid in a hospital bed. He cried, I want to go home. Unfortunately he never saw home again.Thanks a lot Jim. I have a good friend I am going to send this to. I hope you don’t mind.
IANAD but I know that it takes time for lung cancer to grow. I heard somewhere that it takes something like 8 to 15 years for cancer to grow big enough to be diagnosed on average. That would be from the first division of the initial cancer cell I think. Also smoking and cancer risk is dose dependent - that is the risk is small for people who have not smoked very long or very much and high for people who have.
So while technically anyone can get any cancer at any time. if you smoke for 6 months and then are diagnosed with cancer, I think it would be unlikely in the extreme for the smoking to be the culprit.
By All Means!
Cancer starts from cells that have damaged DNA which don’t have the sets of controls that normal cells do. It’s been speculated that all the extraneous bits of DNA that don’t seem to do anything actually help provide a buffer so that DNA damage need not be fatal (to the cell) or worse, create the sort of mutation that leads to cancer. However, over a lifetime the damage adds up, raising your chances of getting cancer. Adding a damaging element, such as smoking or long-term UV radiation, increases the chances yet more, especially in fast-growing tissues like skin. Of course, your chances of getting cancer are also highly influenced by your genetic makeup, so the fact that some people can smoke all their lives and live to 110 just means they inherited a little something extra from mommy and daddy.
I don’t know where to look this up at the moment, but I’ve read that the increased deaths from smoking come from many other diseases than lung cancer. While it’s true that lung cancer is the disease which shows mostly clearly the difference in death rates between smokers and nonsmokers, it’s not by a long shot the only one. Various other cancers are also more common in smokers than in nonsmokers. Smokers die of heart attacks and strokes more often than nonsmokers. Indeed, the number of increased deaths from heart attacks and strokes caused by smoking is greater than the number of increased deaths from lung cancers caused by smoking.
Cancer is effectively a disease of the genes, and only develops when al of the anti-cancer mechanisms are ‘knocked out’. The genes which govern the “divide!” command might be mutated, but this effect is mitigated by tumour suppressor genes. It is generally when both these genes mutate that the uncontrolled cell division called cancer begins.
So, I would guess that the probability of the toxins mutating both of these gene sequences (however the heck they do that) in a very short time are very low. Anyone whose genes were that susceptible to mutation would perhaps develop cancer early on in life due to mutation mechanisms from another source (cosmic rays, food, air pollution etc.).
I can’t address the main part of your post, but wanted to comment that Jennings actually smoked decades ago, then quit; he resumed after 9/11. It seems likely that the cancer which took his life actually got its start from damage inflicted during those earlier years of smoking. Presumably resuming smoking didn’t help, but I doubt it directly caused the cancer that killed him.
I hope you are able to convince your parents to quit. Even though (IIRC) their risk of cancer will still be elevated, their chances of other conditions elevating / worsening (e.g. emphysema) will assuredly drop and they’ll feel better.
A few months before my mother passed away due to lung cancer (she smoked for 55 years), a friend of hers visited. He didn’t have lung cancer. He had such severe emphysema that he could not walk from the car to the front door (20 feet) without his portable oxygen cylinder. No, he didn’t have cancer but he was profoundly limited in his ability to function.
I don’t know what your parents are paying for cigarettes, but the financial issue motivated me to quit ten years ago and the prices here in CA have quadrupled since then. If you add up the amt. they could save in a year and then make suggestions for how to spend it (trip to Hawaii…?) maybe this would be more motivating. An abstract disease down the road is lots easier to ignore than $2000 in the bank!
Jennings started smoking when he was 13 years old and smoked for 40 years after that. It’s sad to think he paid with his life for a dumb decision he made as a child.