Cigarettes

 
Somebody sent me an email about smoking today and it got me
to thinking about my own personal history with cigarettes. Like
handcuffs from hell, those cigarettes really had me at one time. At my
worst I remember smoking up to about three packs a day. What a horrible
time that was, my voice all horse, my budget a mess.

Everybody
makes their own choice when it comes to what sort of chemicals and junk
they’re going to put in their bodies. I did the same. When I was in
sixth grade I went to a slumber party at the home of my friend Diane
Califano… strange how I can even remember her name. We girls all
gathered into a little circle in her bedroom and she went down into her
living room and got some cigarette butts out of her mother’s ashtrays
then brought them back to the room where we were. Lighting them up, we
passed them around us like joints, taking little puffs and that was my
first exposure to cigarettes. I was not terribly impressed but didn’t
dislike them either… no big deal either way, simply my first experience
with smoking.

I don’t know what happened after that to get me
involved with cigarettes, I just know that by the time I was sixteen, I
was not hooked, but a regular partaker of tobacco. My father, a
believer in popular ‘child psychology’ back then, caught the scent of
smoke in my bedroom and told me that if I wanted to smoke, I should do
so down in the kitchen NOT in my bedroom. He was concerned, he said,
that I might burn up the house by falling asleep with a cigarette.
Instead, he thought I should smoke in the kitchen or living room.
Thinking that I was smoking as a rebellion, he thought I’d lose
interest if he allowed it in the house. He was right that I was smoking
as a rebellion, but he was wrong if he thought I wasn’t smart enough to
realize he was trying to manipulate me and I took great pleasure in
smoking in his presence just to annoy him further. Unfortunately, that
sealed my fate and I became hopelessly hooked to nicotine. That
addiction stayed with me for several decades.

Te Bible says
something to the effect of, “Honor your Father and Mother and things
will go well with your life,” (don’t quote me on that – go to
Biblegateway.com and see for yourself)… It’s the commandment with a
promise… anyway, I should have HONORED my father (regardless of how
much he did or did not deserve it) at least in this matter because this
dumb nicotine addiction was a curse for me. First, it was horrendously
expensive for a poor person like me. If I could have back all the money
I spent on cigarettes in my time, good grief, I can’t even imagine how
much I would have. And if you look at it in terms of ratio to amount of
money I earned, it was an extraordinary percentage of my take home pay
at a time in my life when I could ill afford it.

Additionally, I
suffered with asthma once I was in my twenties. I had to go on
medication when I was 21. Things progressed with the asthma so that
when I was 23 and living in Germany I sometimes passed out from how bad
it was. I smoked when I was nursing my baby (Hopeful1) and she
developed asthma which still haunts her to this day. As a matter of
fact, when I gave birth to her, the lower section of my left lung
collapsed requiring me to go into intensive care for four days. The
doctors were very concerned. I quit smoking for three weeks but then
couldn’t resist any more because my (ex) husband and all my friends
smoked so I started smoking again.

Years went on and I continued
to smoke, sometimes running out of cigarettes and becoming so desperate
for a smoke I would dig through my garbage looking for a butt long
enough to smoke. I had a smoker’s hack and my office at work was a fog.
All my clothes smelled like smoke as did my hair and my home. My
children hated it and begged me to quit but I couldn’t. I used to like
awake at night worrying about what would become of my kids if I died of
lung cancer. Still, I couldn’t quit no matter how many times I tried.

Finally,
In 1987, approximately 18 years from the time I started, I became ill
with something like whooping cough. I physically could NOT smoke… just
completely unable. The asthma was so bad no smoke could go into my
lungs. I had a cough that would build into such violence I would throw
up and the whites of both of my eyes burst so that there was only red
in my eyes and no white whatsoever. I was home sick from work on
disability for a month and I realized that smoking wasn’t going to kill
me like I had always thought. Instead, I came to the conclusion that
smoking was just going to make my life unbearable… it would make me
WANT to die. For two months I absolutely couldn’t smoke, even if I
tried. When my health finally began to recover, I did not begin smoking
again.

Even now I get the urge to smoke. Sometimes the desire to
smoke is so overwhelming it’s unbearable and it has been 18 years! Now
and then I have nightmares that I have picked up a cigarette here and
there only to become addicted once again. It’s frightening. And then to
hear about Peter Jennings… twenty years he quit… twenty years!!! Then
he picked it up again after the tragedy of 9-11 and now he’s got lung
cancer.

All this is to say, smoking is every individual’s
decision to start with, but once it’s got its strong roots wound all
around you, the decision feels as if it has been taken away and
replaced with mindless senseless addiction. And it all seems to creep
up on you before you even realize what’s happened!