Short Term Pleasure-Long Term Misery

I don’t know his name, but I see him frequently standing on the same corner, and I know why he is there.

He is a maintenance worker for the school district, and no smoking is allowed on school property.  I don’t know how many times a day he does it, but he walks across the street from the maintenance facility and stands out in the cold smoking.  He is slender and past middle age, and he actually looks rather miserable shivering there with his cigarette.

I feel sorry for him.  I don’t know if he defiantly refuses to quit smoking, or if he is too addicted to escape the clutches of nicotine.  I wonder how far he is from emphysema or lung cancer.  As a nurse, I have seen people die of these diseases.  Some of them have insisted that it was not related to cigarettes.  I know of those who have quit smoking and a few years later died of lung cancer, because it was too late.  One of my own uncles always said he could quit any time and would if he ever needed to do so.  He developed lung cancer and did quit, but it was too late to save his life.  I had a neighbor whose COPD was so bad that he could no longer walk from the garage to the house without stopping to lean on the fence and rest, but he thought all those studies linking his condition to cigarettes were falsified.

I have never in my life smoked a single cigarette, but I do not feel self-righteous about this.  The idea of holding and manipulating a cigarette is actually attractive to me.  I grew up around it, and it seems like a perfectly normal thing.  I wish there was a type of cigarette that could be smoked that was beneficial.

I also recognize that I am not free from the risk of lung cancer.  Recent studies show an increased likelihood of lung cancer in those who have been exposed to cigarette smoke while their lungs were developing.  At one point in my life, I lived with five…yes, that is five…smokers who smoked in the house. 

I was born in 1945 and my Dad was in France fighting in World War II.  My mother and I lived with her parents.  When the war ended, it took men some time to find jobs and become reestablished, so we continued to live with my grandparents, as did all three of my mother’s brothers.  My three uncles, my Dad and my Grandfather all smoked. 

For the first 7 years of my life, we moved in and out of my grandparents’ home.  My mother was bedridden during a pregnancy, and we moved back in with them, so Grandma could care for my Mother.  Grandma had some illnesses, and we moved back in, so Mom could take care of her.  We lived with them when we were between homes.  We moved out for good when I was six, and my Dad smoked until about the time of my seventh birthday.  My developing lungs were exposed to a cloud of carcinogens for the first seven years of my life.

All of these smokers in my life professed great love for me, and I don’t doubt that love.  The dangers of smoking were not clearly understood in the 1940s and 50s.  Although they are understood now, many people are trapped.  Some don’t care.  Some shiver in the cold clutching the nail to their own coffin or their child’s.

Cigarettes= short term pleasure and long term misery.