by Arlene Mae

Created on: April 20, 2010

Go ahead, take just one pack, we can smoke them tonight at the football game.  Peer pressure got me started, although I think I had a fascination with it prior to that fateful day.   I recall being a child of 9 or 10 and emptying pencil shavings into a slip of paper and lighting it up.  Yeah well, one puff was all that took – pluck!  What was I thinking?  Fast forward 6 years, you’d think I learned my lesson but no, I succumb to peer pressure and started my nicotine addiction while cheering on my high school team.

 Fast forward 30 years, my cool beginnings are now a matter of need.  I’m smoking a pack a day and that is with restraint.  My parents both have failed numerous times to quit.  I know its bad for me but I continue to puff. 

 I watched my father deteriorate with his emphysema; he takes oxygen and continues to smoke.  Why doesn’t he stop, as I sit by and puff on my cigarette?   Mom doesn’t take oxygen, because she only smokes a pack a day, Dad smoked close to 3 packs a day.  I know it’s hard, I tried once about 30 years earlier and managed to stop for 2 weeks, but picked it back up.

 My father fell and broke his hip, as he lay in the hospital the doctors determined he needed to be on a ventilator.  Unannounced to them my Dads numbers were normal for him and not on the verge of death.  He never came off the ventilator to breathe on his own again.  I watched him struggle for breathe for 3 weeks, we took him off the ventilator and he passed away.

So would I stop smoking now, having watched my father die of it?  No, the pull, the addiction is so strong.  I am not ready, I realize now though I need to do this.  Mom, who only smoked a pack a day, is now on oxygen too. 

 It was 6 years after my Father's death when I finally wrapped my head around the thought of quitting smoking.  Both parents have passed and I knew if I didn’t quit I would follow in their footsteps, the oxygen, being winded, unable to walk, this was not for me.  I was scheduled for oral surgery in October 2006, the kind where they don’t want you smoking afterwards as it can impede the healing process.  I had already determined to quit smoking in the New Year so I thought I would try it earlier and if I failed I could try again in the New Year. 

 I smoked like a chimney that last day, it wasn’t

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