Hi,
I was writing a note to a friend about a missed connection and I found myself explaining that I had been busy with my friend Dana. He's been busy too, dealing with lung cancer treatments, mostly chemo, after forty years of smoking, and I've been going with him to the chemo infusion center. My uncle Gene is sort of going through the same thing, but he isn't healthy enough to get the treatments if I understand correctly. Anyway here's an excerpt from the note that I wanted to share with folks;
I've been busy, actually, so I don't know if we would have been here when you would have cruised by. Dana went back into the hospital. He had a blot clot in his leg, which oddly enough made his breathing even harder, but I guess that they can do that. The doc's said that clots forming is not an unusual side effect of having the lung cancer. The treatment is a twice daily injection of an anticlotting medicine called Hepron, for six months. He's home from the hospital now, and generally resting. We have two more chemo therapy related visits early this week, then he's off for awhile.
Hey guy's, I know that getting preachy with someone won't work, but I'm still going to make my "sales pitch" here and now, because I'm writing about this and maybe you're thinking about it a little after having read the above paragraph. Please quit smoking while you still can. It's not worth the pain, debilitation, and heart ache. Not being able to breath at half of your normal capacity (alone as a symptom) wrecks everything else in your life. If you have to go through the chemo, besides losing your hair (which seems like nothing compared to the rest of it), you lose your sense of taste, but your sense of smell amplifies horribly, which is when you find out that most smells are not pleasant. Going through the long list of nasty changes to your body usually doesn't scare anyone, I know, besides, they're too long to list here. Because no one can do it for you, please love yourself enough to quit.
C'ya later, MP
It's a topic that hits close to home. Three days after thanksgiving, my wife's grandfather passed away a few months after being diagnosed with stage four lung cancer. Her family, for the most part smokes, as do I. Everyone is in the process of quiting or preparing for it (working with doctors to do it for good in such a way to not make matters worse)
I've lost a few family members and friends to cancer, and have a friend who has been battling cervical cancer. It's a horrible horrible thing to battle. Fortunately, recent developments have resulted in a vaccine to help prevent cervical cancer (this was done at Penn State iirc).
My day job is doing support within the local cancer research institute here in Pittsburgh. I support both clinical treatment apps and support researchers who are working to find a cure. A fair number of them use Macs, and we have a 140 node Xserve cluster working to decode the genome and work to find a cure. While I may not be doing any research or curing the disease myself, I feel that after every day of work, I have done my part to help ensure that those researchers have everything they need to find a cure for it.
At work, every day I encounter patients who are in for treatment at the clinic. Everytime I see what they go through, I have less desire to have a cigarette. I'm hoping to be free of cigarettes by the end of 2007.
I support you. I had a friend diagnosed with Lung cancer about 3 years ago. The day he died (I smoked for 2 years) I threw them away for good. I have been free of tobaco for 3 years, and everytime I have a desire for it, i think about him, shake my head, and grab something else. It helps when you think of people that is close to you that suffer from a fate that you, yourself is headed for. Just think of the people that go through that, and it will sober you up from wanting what caused it.
If anyone around me wants to quit, they have my full support. I will do ANYTHING to keep from them heading down that path.
It eventually comes to the point where you think "What's the use of having them. I don't miss ANYTHING from it"
dude, i think that i speak for all of AF when I say that any help u need, we're here for you. My dad smokes, and he's been quitting for the last 15 years. I lost my mom to cancer about 3 years ago. It was metastatic carcinoma, which means that its a cancer of the whole body. We never knew where it came from.
If you need any support, we're all rooting for you!
I quit smoking 3 years, 7 months, 28 days ago. It was the hardest thing I've had to do.
I won't lie... I've had 5 cigarettes in that time, but not all at once. But that didn't make me want to start smoking again. If anything, waking up the next morning with a taste in my mouth like a gnome had used it as a toilet, and the whole 'gasping for air' thing, made me realize why I quit in the first place.
I recently had a full physical, and when the doctor noticed that I said I used to smoke, he commented that he would have never known it had I not told him. He then told me that after ten years, even a lung specialist would not be able to tell whether I had smoked or not. The healing ability of the human body is a wonderful thing.
Anyway, I'm here to listen to anyone who needs help quitting. I've done it, I know how hard it is, and I think I can help someone else through it.
First, reference this post
My father quit smoking over 10 years ago and his chest x-rays show him to be clean, BUT he has something like 25% lung capacity because of emphacema from chain smoking before he quit. The damage had been done, and he will die earlier then he should have because of it.
When he did the blow in the tube test (for lung capacity) the thing barely moved.