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> All those happy, smoking people who die unknown in the privacy of their > beds. They just disappear. It isn't like an airline disaster, it's quiet > and private. And because of that it's just a part of the scenery . . . > nothing to get upset about. Joel, you're exactly right to point out the incredible waste of life caused by tobacco use, right to be pissed off, and right to feel cheated out of time and "quality of life" with the people you love who succumbed to this mass insanity. As bleak a picture as you paint, reality is worse, and the destruction extends into areas most folks don't think about. It goes way beyond statistics, it's personal. It's obvious now that smoking causes emphysema and cancer, but there is so much more. I never gave a thought to cerebral aneurysms, for example, which is fairly uncommon in relatively young people but the correlation with smoking is huge. 3 years ago I drove to Michigan with my girlfriend and one of her daughters to visit my family for the weekend, and when we drove home a few days later my girlfriend was dead. She "felt a migraine coming on" and went to lie down for a little while. I kept going back and forth, dividing my attention between her and her daughter (who intuitively understood the gravity of what was going on long before I did), and found her struggling, begging me, "Don't leave me, don't leave me, I'm so scared, I'm so scared!". I held her in my arms while she convulsed, vomited and pissed all over herself and me, and fell into a coma. ....911, ambulance, hospital, brain scans... After seeing two different chains of ruptured and rupturing berry aneurysms, and explaining what it meant, what the increased ICP was doing to the parts of her brain that weren't already dead from losing their blood supply, the first question the neurosurgeon asked was "is she a smoker?". She'd quit a couple years before, and we were both so proud of her doing that. We had no idea then that the aneurysms had already begun to form and grow, that smoking had already ensured a premature end to her life. When it was time for me to call her family and let them know what was going on, it was like listening to myself from outside my body, hearing myself choking when I had to say the word "dead" to her mother, struggling to keep from simply breaking down as I could hear her weeping on the other end of the line. Over the approximately two days it took her to die (depending on how you choose to define death), I held her children, tried to answer their questions, tried to help them understand what had happened -- that regardless of how long the machines kept pumping the mother they knew was already gone. Over the months and now years since then they still have questions, still want to know "why". You know why. Those who are still smoking in the face of these terrible lessons confound and enrage me. You selfish fuckers, pull your head out of your ass and look around you. Look in the eyes of your children, your family, and think for a moment about the price you're demanding they pay for your addiction, about the nightmare you're willing to create for them. This isn't just about you. You have responsibilities, and smoking prevents you from fulfilling them. It's that simple. I can understand not caring enough about yourself to break free, but cannot begin to comprehend willful disregard for the people you love and the world around you. Yes, it's hard. Quit anyway, and do it now. Not quitting is worse, whether you live to see it or not. You _can_ stop, and for most of you it's not too late to recover from much of the damage you've been doing. Just so this post isn't entirely unrelated to diving, I'll just mention that every time I learn about another fuck and run, dead buddy in cave dive, I hear the same thing I heard from my girlfriend, and I hear it in her voice... "Don't leave me, I'm so scared!". It's pretty compelling, and I find acknowledging my responsibilities to be a source of strength when faced with something difficult. - Todd p.s. Those who wish to deny or diminish the true impacts of smoking may feel inclined to point out that the mechanism by which aneurysms form is poorly understood, and that it also correlates with family history and presumably a genetic predisposition. I've read everything I could find about this, and it's quite clear that at a minimum, smoking causes or allows the formation of the aneurysms to begin much sooner in the life of someone predisposed to them. Oh, is that all? Think of what a difference 15 or 20 years with a loving parent can make in the life of a child.
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