Break Points
Smoking: For fools only
Jack Ganssle
6/21/2010 1:01 PM EDT
Expected? Yes. He’d been battling lung cancer, the result of 40 years of smoking. The insidious disease had been cured, reoccurred, stamped down again, reemerged as brain cancer, and recently exploded throughout his body. The awful addiction possessed him. Only the cancer had been force enough to cure him of the habit, much too late.
He was the family’s patriarch. He kept the siblings together despite distance, time, and the silly stresses that so often break families. In Rhode Island winters, before we were married, my wife was a poor single mother struggling to keep the apartment warm. But she’d sometimes find her heating oil tank filled, a gift without a card from Tom.
He’d been a lobsterman, but had moved ashore after many years of his family worrying about every low pressure system. His boat, chartered to another fisherman, had been lost but a wonderful drawing of it hangs above their mantle. Plumbing kept the family solvent. I have no idea what will replace that.
Does incontinence sound like fun? Then smoke. How about a morphine drip? Or a disease that rots out every organ? Smoke! There is no tomorrow!
I’ve been fortunate to have avoided that habit, and really don’t think about it much. Trips to some countries, though, have always scared me with the haze that seems de rigor. Young Americans have thankfully missed the smoke-filled rooms that were once all too common. Somehow, though, Philip Morris still trades at $45 per share.
Since Tom was diagnosed, every time I see a young person puffing part of me wants to grab that idiot and do something – what I have no idea – to convince him or her that that coffin nail is the beginning of the end. When I was in high school it was considered adult-like to knock off a pack a day. We were dumb. And too many kids today are still making the same addictive mistake.
If you smoke: STOP! The cost is indescribable, and I will not sully this page with a description of how awful the end will be. There is no upside. It is not cool. You will die, probably much too young,
Life is astonishingly short and incredibly wonderful. Don’t make it shorter.
Jack G. Ganssle is a lecturer and consultant on embedded development issues. He conducts seminars on embedded systems and helps companies with their embedded challenges. Contact him at jack@ganssle.com. His website is www.ganssle.com.
|
|
|
|
|
worknhard9062
6/21/2010 1:25 PM EDT
Wow Jack! My sincere condolences to you and your family. Losing a loved one sucks. Losing them to something like a lifestyle choice of cigarette smoking really sucks. I lost my mother, a brother-in-law and sister-in-law to cancer. They were all smokers. My older brother, who lost the wife, continues to smoke. Sigh... My story is hardly worthy of note though. I'm quite (sadly) certain that many, many others that read your columns can attest to their own brand of pain and suffering attributed to cancer.
Thanks for reminding us that even though we traffic in bits and electrons, we're still human at the core - and life is very, very precious.
Sympathies again,
Steve C.
Sign in to Reply
krwada
6/21/2010 2:09 PM EDT
My sincere condolences to you and your family Jack.
![]()
src="http://i111.photobucket.com/albums/n138/krwada/holidays/condolences_sympathyaaae.jpg" border="0" alt="Condolences">
.
Losing a loved one really sucks ... no matter how one slices it.
Sign in to Reply
FrankCF
6/24/2010 1:02 PM EDT
I lost my wife to cancer 5 years ago. She was 57 and smoked since she was 17. On the way to the hospital, after being told she most likely had cancer, she had a cigarette. Watching my wife slowly dying did cause my daughter to stop smoking. I was amazed the other day to find a smoking area at a hospital. Hospitals should be the first to not allow smoking anywhere. I worked for a company that wouldn't allow smoking anywhere on their property. The smokers stood in the street no matter what the weather. When I was in grammar school, in the 50s, they showed movies of what a smoker's lung looked like. They should make those images mandatory on the outside of cigarette packs.
Sign in to Reply
one_armed_bandit
6/28/2010 4:25 PM EDT
Jack:
My deepest sympathies to you and your family. I happen to agree with your basic attitude.
I have not had the experiences of TFC-SD.
If one *is* addicted to nicotine, the patch is a really good way to go. My instructor in college on Drugs and Human Behavior, Dr Frank Etscorn, held the basic patent on the patch (full disclosure), but his research was almost strictly centered around nicotine. One of his findings was: nicotine (via a patch/gum, *not* smoking), will not cause physiological harm, other than death via overdose. Simply put, if it does not kill you, it does not harm you.
Note the LD50, the overdose limit, is quite small. Two patches at the same time will kill a fair percentage of users.
see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Nicotine_poisoning
Smoking as a delivery mechanism is what causes the cancer. There are nasty stuff in that smoke.
For the survey: never smoked, never pressured.
Sign in to Reply