by Vicky Bladen

Created on: June 22, 2010   Last Updated: June 25, 2010

You know it's bad for you, But you keep smoking anyway. I have been smoking myself since I (was 16, all my friends were smoking and we openly said we smoked because it made us look "cool".

I find my worst moments to be on a night out, if I have a drink in my hand, I have to have a cigarette too, and the next morning I cough and cough and it feels like my lungs are filled with gunge, I get breathless easy and always have some sort of chest infection, so why do I keep doing it? Why do any of us continue to smoke knowing the health risks involved.

Well lets start with the cons, the basics are obviously clothes and hair smelling of smoked, stained teeth, a bad cough, all the way down to emphysema, lung cancer, throat cancer, and yet despite knowing all this we ignore it, thinking we will never be the ones to have lung cancer due to smoking.

I find lung cancer isn't even top of my list of reasons to stop when i think about quitting sometimes. Instead I think about how I don't want to have wrinkles and how I wish I had whiter teeth.

There was once a time where I did quit, I managed to last 6 months without puffing away, and during those 6 months my health dramatically improved, within days I felt I could walk further without suffering from breathlessness, i found that although I was still coughing for a couple of weeks, I felt as tho they were in a way emptying of all the substances I had inhaled, and I suppose they were. Before I knew it, my breathing got easier and I stopped getting chest infections.

And not only was I benefiting from easier breathing but I no longer smelled of stale smoke all of the time, and my chances of getting lung cancer or suffering from a heart attack had decreased, so why did I start smoking again?

When out with friends drinking I found it hard not to join in with the crowd, I found it a very sociable thing to smoke, and maybe one day I'll think about the improvements in my health, and how it felt good to breath easy, but until then I'll continue to slowly kill myself with the stick of poison and I'll enjoy it too.

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