Smoking

[vickster]

I stopped December last year with the help of ecigs . I actually didn't intend to stop although i knew i should for my health and cycling . The ecig was a direct replacement for me so i think they are a great stopping aid . Giving up the ecig is on the cards soon !

Just do it...

 

[youngoldbloke]

Yes - just do it. Give up. It's not only lung cancer it causes, but heart disease. I had to give up before my first angioplasties - no operation unless a non-smoker. I wouldn't have 5 stents in my arteries if I hadn't smoked.

 

[Accy cyclist]

I had my first cigarette at 13 and my last at 47. I was never a heavy smoker, probably averaging 4 or 5 a day but i developed a cancerous tumour on the back of my tongue when i was 47.i noticed a slight sore throat that turned into a painful sore throat, then a secondary appeared in the glands in my neck. I had an 8 hour operation which cut my right pectoral muscle away and directed it to my neck to fill the hole left by the removed tumour. My jaw was also cut open so the surgeon could get to the cancer. When i came round my head was swollen to twice its size and my pectoral which i'd developed through decades of weight lifting was no more! I felt horrible, i couldn't look in a mirror for a week and the first time i looked at my reflection i felt like ending my life. My tongue was stitched to the bottom of my mouth to stop it from moving for a month and i was fed through a tube going through my nose as i couldn't eat. Psychologically i was in a mess, i couldn't go outside the house in case i had to talk to someone or someone would stare at my facial scars. A month after the operation i had 27 sessions of radiotherapy which burnt my neck to a cinder and 6 chemo' sessions which to be honest didn't affect me much apart from having a bit of sickness and tiredness. Eight years later i still feel the affects of that life saving operation and like others wish i'd never smoked. When i see youngsters with a cigarette in their mouths i want to stop them and show them my cut open chest and my scarred thinned down neck and tell them to quit before they end up like me.

 

[slowmotion]

^^^^^^^^ Thanks @Accy cyclist. I don't care if my contemporaries smoke, and I actually don't mind tobacco smoke at all, but when I see young people and kids smoking, it upsets me. It didn't do me any good but I seem to have got off pretty lightly so far. We were shown films of diseased lungs and coughing etc when I was at school. "What's that got to do with me?" we thought. I suppose we should be grateful for youthful optimism, but sometimes when I see a kid of thirteen with a cigarette I just want to show him a surgical scar down the middle of my thorax and ask him if he wants one like it , forty years down the line. It wouldn't do any good of course, he's immortal, like I was.