Two years ago Dec 3rd I lost my father to a smoking related disease. It was a slow, unpleasant death. Please, if you smoke, spare yourself from this death, give it up now.
When he was young he said “Its my body, I’ll do what I want”
In the early part of his disease he said “I know men who smoked until they were 80, smoking doesn’t cause this.”
As his disease progressed and he was gasping, struggling for breath he said “This isn’t life, its not living. I’m just waiting to die.”
It was horrible to watch.
One of the worst moments of my life was when he lay in his hospital bed gasping for breath and he looked me in the eyes and said: “I’m scared.”
Someone else close to me, a good friend, died 9 years ago of lung cancer. In the end, he was begging God to take him, it hurt so much.
His death was the most horrible thing I have ever seen in my life. In the end he was little more than a skeleton covered with papery thin yellow skin. His tongue was so dried up it looked like a parrot’s tongue. And he was in constant pain depite liberal doses of morphine.
He also used to scoff at medical advice that smoking caused lung cancer because he knew people who smoked all of their lives without getting it. And he also had heard of people who never smoked who did get lung cancer.
Yet the facts are that 85% of lung cancer victims are smokers or former smokers, while only around 20% of the population are smokers. And I think it is a good bet that the other 15% have been exposed to passive smoking.
A guy who worked at my plant just died from smoking. He got lung cancer, had it removed, got it again, had the lung removed, got more cancer on his kidney, got chemo, got better, got another tumor on a legbone, got radiation, got better. But the one in his brain got him. He only stopped smoking when they had taken out part of one lung and all of the other and he didn’t have the lung capacity to drag on a cigarette. Stop now before it is too late.
My dad just finished a round of chemo/radiation therapy for laryngeal cancer. Fall of 2002 he was diagnosed and had radiation then. He was clear until last winter, when he had his first surgery & took half of his larynx. This past September, they took the rest of his larynx and shortly after his recovery from that surgery, did the radiation/chemo combination.
I’m still fighting the fight against smoking - I’m down to those last two cigarettes a day, and I’ve got my date set for giving those up. I wish I’d never started - I wish he’d never started and I wish my brother had never started. It sucks and it’s deadly. And I know that if I don’t come off of them completely (and possibly even if I do), that one of my actions for a number of years will kill me.
Four great-grandparents died of cancer. An aunt and uncle died of cancer. A cousin has it. My mother-in-law has it. A dear, dear friend died of it as well.
I quit smoking February 7, 2000. My wedding gift from my husband was that he quit smoking. It’s been really difficult for him, going back and starting again, quitting over and over, but we hope he’s done for good now.
My quit date is this Wednesday, December 7, “the day that will live in infamy”. I’ve bought some nicotine lozenges to help. They’re expensive but I figure they’re worth many times the price if they work.
I lost my father 3 years ago in July from emphysema due to many, many years of smoking. He watched his father die from emphysema and he quit smoking then but it was too late, he had smoked for most of his life, the damage had been done. It took about 20 more years for it to really take effect but it took it’s toll. He had to have constant respiratory therapy, and he could barely walk across the room without getting winded.
He eventually went into the hospital for pneumonia and had one of the bullae on his lungs pop on the day he was supposed to be discharged. He never got discharged. He went to ICU and started to improve again but then another bullae popped or his chest tube leaked and he developed subcutaneous emphysema (air under the skin) all over. It was very painful. They put him on morphine and he was pretty much unconscious for his last day and a half, he then went into multiple organ failure and died. He spent a total of two weeks in the hospital and we were up and down, first thinking he might die, then having him get better and almost get released. Then having him get much worse and possibly die again, then get better and possibly be released in a few days. Then having him get much worse and possibly die and then knowing he was going to die. My sister and my mother spent that last night in the hospital with him and he passed around 10 am the next morning. It was the hardest thing I’ve ever had to do.
My grandfather made it to his 80’s, my dad only made it to 78, but their last several years were not easy. I can’t help but wonder how long they might have lived if they had never smoked. What I don’t understand is how two of my brothers continue to smoke after watching both our grandfather and father die from smoking related diseases.
My father died of lung cancer. His father also died of lung cancer. My mother would have died from lung cancer except that a stroke killed her first (rather more quickly than her death would have been otherwise).
Unfortunately, my elder son smokes and nothing I can say gets through to him.
I’ve lost non-smoking relatives to cancer. (Including lung). I’m not going to debate the smoking argument here, I’m agreeing with the OP. (Though I will reserve the agreement with 2nd hand smoke. I can’t help it. Sorry.)
If you smoke, stop. Even if it takes a hundred tries. I’ll eventually stop, one way or another. But for all the rants I have of the taxes and perceived social controls, quit if you’re even thinking of it. You can always take it up again. None of us smokers started out at a pack a day.
From what this thread seems to be to me, it’s a simple call to stop smoking. No argument here so take this post for what it is. Joining the chorus. I just fear I’m stubborn enough to argue the correlation/causation kicking and screaming to my grave encased in an iron lung.
Sadly, that’s the irrationality tobacco-free proponents face. I, for one, appreciate your concern. But you have to also understand, as an addict we’re a defensive bunch and some of the heavy-handed tactics just get us building up the fortresses. This paragraph doesn’t have much to do directly with the OP, just trying to let you in on a few “club rules” of smokers. I’ll probably be voted off the island in the morning.
In essence, we smokers for the most part agree. Stop smoking. I just hope those that want/hope/wish we’d stop smoking would realize many tactics make us feel like lesser people and get into a doubly defensive mode. We hear ya. Deep down we know smoking is bad for us. Stop beating us over the head with it.
Anyway, sorry for any sense of a hijack. Just wanted to remind some of what you’re asking us to do. We, for the most part, want to quit. It’s some of the tactics that make us defiantly buy the next pack.
Overall, when it’s all said and done, though, quitting has no drawbacks. No reason not to. And I’m giving it my 6th try on Jan 12th. Why the 12th? Why not. Seems artificial when a date like the 1st is used. The 12th is just as good as any date. Wish me luck.
I’ve had surgery for oral cancer four times time; the last time, I really believed I was a dead man. If it returns, it probably will kill me. I wish I could get eveyone, everywhere to just quit: it ain’t worth it.
A lot of the more rabid anti-smoking groups are very evangelical about it. Its almost like a religion or political cause to them. I don’t really understand what makes them like that and I can see how it can make smokers feel unnecessarily bad about themselves. And it maybe even provokes a backlash amongst politically motivated smokers.
Good luck with your giving up. Its not easy, I used to smoke up to 25 a day 3 years ago but drastically reduced my smoking after my uncle dropped dead from a brain bleed. Something he was probably born with but also probably aggravated by smoking. I still do occasionaly smoke, perhaps once every 6 weeks.
It’s hard sometimes for people to really, truly grasp the horror of what they’re doing to themselves with smoking. It is so easy for people to be in denial about their own mortality and the whole “It can’t happen to me” thing.
My dad didn’t have cancer, but he did die a very painful and horrible death from the consequences of smoking combined with diabetes (never a good combination). He was only 57 years old when he died. As if that weren’t bad enough on its own, he was very seriously disabled for the last 10 years of his life. For those final 10 years, he could no longer speak in complete sentences, and struggled to move the right half of his body, thanks to a major stroke. I believe that his smoking habit contributed significantly to having a stroke at such a young age. Unfortunately, after the stroke, he was quite stubborn about continuing to smoke…probably because he felt like he had nothing left to lose.
It turned out that there was in fact still much left to lose. The smoking and diabetes led to some more very serious circulation problems, with agonizing results.
I don’t really have the mental energy to go into a graphic account of the hideously painful, foul-smelling gangrene that developed in his leg…or the inevitable leg amputation that resulted, or the three heart attacks, or the heart bypass surgery, or the surgery he had to have to try to save the OTHER leg from amputation…or the infection from the leg surgery, which turned into an overwhelming systemic infection and finally killed him. Needless to say, none of that was pleasant…and none of it probably would have happened if he had stopped smoking before things became so ugly.
If he truly realized when he was healthy what path smoking would lead him down, I’m sure he would not have considered it worth it.
He’s only been gone three years, but yet it makes me sad to think of how much has happened to me in the last few years that he wasn’t around to see and participate in. He didn’t get to see me graduate from college or accepted at med school. He’ll miss out on my wedding and any grandchildren.
Sure, a parent dying before a child is the natural order of things…but when a parent dies prematurely, it leaves so much unfinished business. I will always feel there is a missing piece in my life, because he should have been around so much longer than he was. If only we had had another 10 or 20 years together, I think I could have found it much easier to find peace and acceptance after his death. Instead, his premature absence from my life will always be a little scar on my heart.
So, for anyone out there who has children or plans to have children…I especially urge you to stop for their sake, so that you can be around for them for as long as possible.
I’ve been an occasional smoker for five years or so. Sometime during the last summer it crept up to a half-a-pack a day habit. (Yay stress! And hooray for laying off smoking pot!)
A lot of that stress comes from watching my mother’s slow death from a grab-bag of diseases, the most distressing of which to watch is chronic obstructive pulmonary disease, one of a few conditions she has thanks to more than five decades of smoking.
Repeatedly seeing her light up minutes after having choking fits that leave her unable to get a breath for alarmingly long times and frequently cause her to void her bladder or worse – that’s a hell of an incentive to quit.
Anyway, it’s been almost two weeks since I bought a pack.
I quit last May. Despite my SO (he’s never smoked) and my parents (both have quit) wanting me to quit sooner, a person cannot quit because others want them to. I had to really want to quit for myself.
Bolding mine.
My dad smoked… and used to say that, too!
He suffered cancer three times before it ultimately killed him.
I was 18 when he died. I’m 45 now.
My mother watched him die and continued to smoke through his chemotherapy…through having his voicebox, portion of his lower jaw and part of his tongue removed… through the lung cancer that ultimtely killed him.
Mom put down her cigarettes about 13 years ago. No therapy, no gum, no support groups. God bless her!
Unfortunately, it was too little, too late.
She’s got a meningioma. A tumor that’s crowding out her brain. Doctors believe that it’s causing some memory loss, vision problems and dementia.
Removing it (or even a portion of it) isn’t a terribly difficult procedure. It’s not brain cancer; so even if they remove only a portion of it, that’ll relieve the pressure on her brain. The problem is that recovery from the surgery would be long and fairly painful.
Oh, sure , the meningioma wasn’t CAUSED by smoking.
The LUNG CANCER that she has was caused by smoking.
If she didn’t have lung cancer, she’d probably be able to withstand the anesthesia and recuperation for removal of the meningioma.
As it is; she’s in a nursing home on oxygen and on pain medication. They just recently took her off vicodin and put her on morphine. I took a five-day road-trip with my son to go visit her. I don’t think she remembers I was even there.
Matter of fact, I think I’m going to call up my best friend and beg that he and his wife stop smoking now, too. They have a fourteen-year-old daughter.
