Smoking Related Illnesses



Roy didn't think he would ever suffer from any smoking related illnesses. Now, as he lay in a bed in the intensive care ward, he wished he'd listened to his doctor 20 years earlier. The doctor had been right about the illness, and the cigarette companies had all been wrong. No, they weren't wrong: they were Liars. They'd been lying all those years about the dangers of cigarette smoking. Roy had recently heard that an Oregon woman had won 20 million dollars over the death of her husband, but no amount of settlement money in the world would do any good for Roy, now. And even if his wife got 20 million, he wouldn't be there to console her when she grieved over his grave.



He'd started smoking when he was in fifth grade, at just eleven years old. Back then, no one knew anything about illness or death from smoking. It was the sixties, but now here he lay, after a lifetime of addiction to nicotine. That first day, he'd spotted some other boys pushing his bike up the stairs of their house while he and his friends stood in an alley behind a shed, smoking a cigarette. He didn't inhale, not then. The boys who were stealing the bike knew they were seen and came up and threatened to tell Roy's parents if he said anything. They returned the bike, but Roy didn't stop smoking. He just kept right on, all through grade school, junior high, and 4 years of high school. He was one of the cools guys.

Roy tried breathing harder but it didn't help much. The ventilator kicked in and helped give him more oxygen, but he couldn't tell. He had chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). In fact, he had every smoking related disease that one could possibly imagine. He had emphysema, a hardening of the flexible air sacs in his lungs where oxygen an carbon dioxide was exchanged, making it almost impossible for his lungs to expand and contract. He wished that was all, but it wasn't. He'd also developed asthma, a condition that causes thick secretions of mucous from his bronchial tubes, obstructing the air and flowing downward where it slowly flooded his lungs. Then there was the bronchitis, constant inflammation of his bronchial tubes that had caused the heavy coughing and attempts to expel the mucous. Oh, if only he had listened.

The doctor first told him he had heart disease: that his arteries were clogged around his heart, causing hypertension, and starving his heart for blood. But after the heart disease and before the heart attack, there was also the stroke that caused brain damage with resulting partial paralysis to the right side of his body. Ugh. Life was no fun after that.