According to the American Lung Association:
http://www.lungusa.org/site/pp.asp?c=dvLUK9O0E&b=669263
ETA the URL
Damn. You did that in JHS, with a geiger counter no less. You’re all kinds of cool in my book. I did a presentation on the brain and optical illusions. So boring next to a geiger counter.*
Anyway, yeh. After 400 cigarettes… which is 2/3 of a month if you’re a pack-a-day smoker, your body has to process that kind of gooey, carcinogenic poison, I’m amazed you don’t keel over within a year.
*ever run a GC over a smoker?
Oh, it wasn’t really that great of a project; one of my lesser efforts, actually, and it required only a few hours of actual work along with sending the filter to a lab for testing. It was a weekender, really, and I did it in lieu of my intended (but underfuneded) project, which was buliding a (small) particle accelerator. The Geiger counter was in the local university lab, no biggie. I actually think visual processing and the cognitive issues that cause optical illusions are far more interesting, at least from a basic science standpoint. The fact that tobacco scavenges a lot of heavy metals, including radioactive isotopes, from the ground and fertilizers applied was and is well-known, except of course by the “scientists” of the Tobacco Institute.
Stranger
For the past 4 years or so I’ve smoked on and off on a completely random schedule - i.e. there would be months where I wouldn’t smoke at all, months where I’d smoke a cigarette every day, and rarely, days where I’d smoke 2 or more cigarettes. There would be portions of the year (summer) with barely any smoking, and then during the fall I’d smoke a cigarette maybe once a day for a week or so, then stop, start again later, no specific routine whatsoever.
For the past 2 weeks or so I’ve smoked about one cigarette (hand rolled, with European additive-free bulk tobacco and a little cottonwad shoved in the end as a filter) each day, either early in the morning or in the evening after dinner. By the time my pack of bulk tobacco runs out, I’ll probably have tired of smoking for a while, and go a month or so without it.
Since I’ve been doing this for a long time, I don’t think I’m getting addicted. If I do, I’ll just stop smoking altogether (I did it with weed and that worked just fine.)
I think I’m probably going to be OK in the long run with this kind of smoking habit. I don’t eat junk food, very rarely drink soda, consume a ton of Omega-3 containing fish (probably eat fish at least 4 times a week) and try to use as many organic products as I possibly can, within reason.
Maybe. Maybe not. As Damon Runyon once said “All life is 5 to 4 against”.
I’m 66 in a few weeks, I’ve smoked since I was about 13-14 years old.
I’m as fit as a butchers dog, I have all my hair with just a few silver threads 
, my skin is as a teenagers,I’m not overweight, and altho’ no oil painting I’m no elephant man .
I don’t have shortness of breath and can’t remember the last time I was sick.
Guess I’m one of the lucky ones eh?
Just think of how good of shape you’d be in if you hadn’t smoked for the last 53 yrs.
You sound like my grandparents. Heavy smokers since their teens, young-looking, healthy, vigorous into their retirement years. (Especially my grandfather–he was still quite the hottie at 70.)
Then in their mid-seventies, they just fell apart. Emphysema for Grandma, chronic bronchitis for Grandpa. Sure, you can’t say that dying at 81 is dying young (they went within four months of each other). But their last years were pretty miserable, mainly due to the abuse their lungs had taken over the years.
All that fish is filling you with mercury, you know…
:smack:
I just heard from my grandmother that my grandfather had emergency surgery for an impacted bowel over the weekend. (Apparently the surgeon had to remove 10.5 inches of dead intestine.) That was probably not related to smoking at all. However, he’s still being drugged into unconsciousness as of today, because they can’t take him off of the ventilator yet due to damage to his lungs from his smoking days. He was at five packs a day for decades before having a heart attack and quitting cold turkey twenty years ago.
Apparently smoking can hurt you in other ways than the ways that kill you. I’m glad I never started.
It may well have been related to smoking. Smoking causes not only an increased incidence of coronary artery narrowing, but also narrowing of the arteries that feed the bowel. Those arteries get narrow, get blocked by a tiny passing clot, and all of a sudden a lot of tissue is dying, heart or intestines.
I hope your grandfather does better soon!
According to my grandmother (who’s starting to get a little confused at… 85, I think, but is mostly pretty sharp), the doctors are thinking that it’s his diabetes. On the other hand, he’s a vegan who has had pretty good control of his blood sugar for fifteen years or more. shrug Sounds like it could go either way.
And thanks!
And as a minor digression to the thread, not many people have the willpower to turn themselves around like my grandfather did.
He spent decades as an alcoholic, heavy smoking, typically heavy eating Italian chef and bar owner before he met my grandmother (after my biological grandfather died). He quit drinking for her, and quit smoking and went heavily health food vegan and started exercising after the heart attack. And he’s kept it all up all of these years with nary a frown or complaint (even when cooking the whole family fabulous elaborate meals he wouldn’t eat). And it kind of pisses me off that he still needs to deal with this kind of aftereffects after all of this time.
Everybody dies of something eventually. If he hadn’t changed his lifestyle, he may well have passed on long ago, or been so debilitated by disease years earlier that his life would have been far less enjoyable. To reach one’s 80’s while still active and enjoying life is a great event, IMHO.
How’s he doing now?
Last I heard, they tried to take him off of the ventilator again, but had to hook him back up after 15 minutes. They’re reassuring my grandmother (who’s understandably anxious) that he’s going to be fine, they just won’t let him wake up until he can breathe on his own. (*ETA: I received an update just as I hit submit. He’s off the ventilator, and slowly waking up. ) *
And I know that intellectually he’s actually pretty healthy considering everything. It’s just that emotional reaction of, “But he’s doing everything right!” I halfway think that the media has deluged us in so much advice, it convinces us that if we eat right and exercise we’ll live forever.
Thanks again.