My mother's partner Al quit smoking the day he entered the hospital for the last time, in October 2001. He had been diagnosed with lung cancer three years earlier. He had been through chemotherapy and radiation therapy, but eventually the tumor returned. The night before he died, the tumor broke through an artery in one of his lungs, and his lung filled with blood. He died coughing up blood, tumor, and lung tissue. He drowned in his own blood.
My mom quit smoking a month earlier, in September of 2001, shortly after she began chemotherapy for lung cancer. She used a nicotine patch for several weeks and never smoked again. The type of lung cancer mom had was much more aggressive and fast moving than Al's. Chemotherapy gave my mom a few extra months of relatively good health, if you consider being bald and nauseous good. Eventually the tumor outwitted her doctor's arsenal of poisons, and killed her. She died July 2002, a little less than a year after she was diagnosed. She was 73 years old.
That's simple. If you smoke, I want you to quit. If you don't smoke, but care about someone who does, I want you to get that person to quit. Because smoking really does kill people. The nicotine patch was an easy way to quit. Al developed emphysema years before the cancer. If they had both quit then, they might well both still be here. Dying of cancer is not easy, and it can be awful. Not just for the person dying, but for everyone who cares for them as well.
It is hard to quit, even when you know you should.
My mom was a physician. She often said that she went into medicine partly because she was afraid of her own death, and wanted to feel some sort of control over it. She was one of the most intelligent, clear thinking people I have ever known, except when the topic was her smoking. She lied to herself about smoking and its risks for her and her family. We all grew up breathing her smoke, and so did her grandchildren. Just as she refused to believe that smoking could harm her, she ridiculed any complaint of ours about her smoking and our exposure to second hand smoke. Second hand smoke can lead to the same diseases as smoking. When we think of mom now, we also have to wonder whether we or our children might die this way too, because of her smoking. Sadly, this is a part of her legacy.
As a smoker, mom felt that her family was always attacking her about her smoking. She even encouraged my brother to start smoking again after he quit, just so she would have someone on "her side". In some ways she identified more with cigarettes than with us.
Nicotine is a powerfully addictive drug. Mom's need for nicotine was more powerful than her love for her family and more powerful than her fear of death.
The Center for Disease Control (CDC) says that half of all regular smokers die or become incapacitated from diseases caused by smoking. This number includes not only lung cancer, but other cancers caused by cigarette smoke, emphysema, strokes, and heart attacks as well. If this number is correct, and if you and someone you care about both smoke, it is very likely (75% probability, or 3/4ths the time) that at least one of you (and quite possibly both of you) will die or become incapacitated from smoking. So make a pact with someone else who smokes, and quit together.
Maybe you think, "I don't care if I die a few years earlier when I'm in my 70's". But you know what? When you are in your 70's you will. Mom sure did.
So quit, and get your friends to quit too.
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