Ricochet is the best place on the internet to discuss the issues of the day, either through commenting on posts or writing your own for our active and dynamic community in a fully moderated environment. In addition, the Ricochet Audio Network offers over 50 original podcasts with new episodes released every day.
In Lieu of Flowers, Please Stop Smoking
I learned something interesting earlier this month. If you want to donate your body to medical research, there’s usually a minimum weight requirement. If you’re an adult, you need to weigh at least a hundred pounds. If you’re too emaciated, for example, from a long illness, they won’t take you.
I discovered this because I spent the latter half of January helping to take care of a terminal cancer patient. One day she could walk down the stairs. The next day she needed help. The day after that, she lost all feeling below the waist.
At that point, there’s no point in doing scans to figure out what’s wrong. Everyone involved understood that the end was fast approaching. The cancer had either spread to her spine or her brain. Either way, it wouldn’t be long, so a call was made to hospice.
That’s where I come into the story. By the time I arrived, the patient already had a hospital bed. After eight months of cancer treatment, she had no hair left. The last time she’d been weighed, she was down to 94 pounds.
It took two weeks, but she finally passed, early one morning. At that point, there was no pain. I was administering generous doses of liquid morphine using an oral syringe, the kind without a needle that you use to administer meds to a child.
She was unresponsive by then, and we had called the hospice on-call nurse to see if there was anything else we could do. Other than tell me to stop suctioning when she’d start foaming at the mouth, and ordering more morphine to make sure we didn’t run out, there wasn’t anything more to be done.
I’d read about it, of course, but I’d never seen the process of death before. I’d never seen what happens when a person’s kidneys shut down. I’d never seen someone’s color change. I’d never seen someone start foaming at the mouth because her lungs were filling with fluid. I never realized, until it was gone, how much flesh a woman has on her skull, including at the temples. And I’d never seen someone draw her last breath.
As some of you reading this already know, the cancer patient I’m talking about is my mother.
Look, I’m the last person to tell someone how to live his life. If you want to shoot heroin into your eyelids before you attend the weekly orgy at your lesbian coven, I really don’t care. But what happened to my mother was not an accident. It was not random. It was not fate. It was not chance. My mother chain smoked for 45 years. She kept smoking even after being diagnosed with small cell carcinoma. She was literally chain smoking on her deathbed. The only thing that made her quit was the oxygen tubes she had up her nose to allow her to continue breathing.
We were lucky with my mother. They found her lung cancer early enough that we were all able to get in a full cycle of holidays together: Mother’s Day, her birthday, Thanksgiving, Christmas. Contrast that with Walt Disney, who died of lung cancer six weeks after it was revealed on an x-ray.
If you’re a smoker, I realize quitting is a difficult thing. But it’s going to catch up with you. Think about how your children will have to watch you die. Think about your son having to suction the foam out of your mouth as you drown in your own lungs.
Think about the future and think about the waste of life. My mother wasn’t old. She was 62 when she died. It doesn’t need to be that way. You have a choice in the matter.
This post was originally published on Feb. 15, 2016.
Published in General, Healthcare
My parents smoked heavily. I still remember the brands they smoked, Salem and Tareyton.
When I was, maybe 12 or 13, I was in the car with them in the back seat when the smoke was getting to me. This was before the big second hand smoke scare that has mostly been over hyped. That particular vehicle did not have roll-down windows in the back passenger seats, so I asked if they could roll down the window. My dad, piqued at me, said no. My mom a few minutes later was getting nauseous, so they did indeed roll down the windows.
I swore then, that I would never smoke cigarettes, and I have not, beyond a a couple of puffs here and there (I was dared by shipmates in the Coast Guard; but I didn’t continue beyond those puffs).
BTW, my younger brother did smoke starting as a late teen, but ended up quitting cold turkey in his mid-twenties, when he suffered shortness of breath that turned out to be a collapsed lung. We both had our own fortunate wakeup calls.
It’s hard to say whether smoking contributed to my dad’s early death, because he also had had a massive heart attack in his 40’s, and that seemed to be due to some very high stress levels (financial problems, along with marital difficulties that can go with it). Though he recovered from both the heart attack and the financial problems, he ended up passing in his mid-fifties, and lung problems contributed to it.
On the other hand, his death wasn’t a bad one, not compared to Fred Cole’s mother. I do think a combination of heart and lungs were contributors.
In my mom’s case, she too was starting to have lung problems that included minor COPD. In the end it was an aneurysm that got her, and that was a very quick death.
She only lived to seventy-one.
The silver lining for me, was their behavior kept me from having to deal with nicotine addiction. Though my brother did, he was able to escape it, and hasn’t smoked for 30 plus years.
In 2015 I lost 2 aunts to smoking.
My mother’s older sister was 69, had never been a heavy smoker, but was a steady one. During April and May she complained of shortness of breath and thought she had bronchitis. In June her GP told her she had pneumonia. In July she had to be taken by a squad to the ER. 2 weeks later she was dead. It was advanced lung cancer all along, probably accelerated by heavy drinking.
3 week later my uncle’s wife died from advanced emphysema. She was nearly 90 and had been a heavy smoker since her teens, I don’t know how she lasted as long as she did, but even when on oxygen she was still sneaking away for smokes.
I am eternally grateful that my father, himself a heavy smoker since his teens, quit 4 years ago with the help of e-cigs. He walked himself down over about 6 months. He just turned 70 and had his lungs checked – so far so good, but he still gets himself checked regularly, just in case.
Friends, any of you who have rediscovered this piece are invited to share it with people. Especially on social media.
I never met my paternal grandfather, who died before I was born. He was the oldest of eleven. Of that eleven, all the heavy smokers died in their 50s. All of the light or non-smokers lived into their 80s.
I sent your essay to my son, Fred. Thank you.
Whenever my game wardens grumble that, back in their day nobody complained about stress, or took anti-depressants, I point out that everybody—EVERYBODY—smoked. (And drank.)
My father died at 68, from heart disease that was, I am convinced, caused by the toxic combination of PTSD (he was a combat veteran) and smoking. ( Also; butter and whipped cream…which I would not deny him. He didn’t drink, at least!)
I think that ‘vaping” is better for you than smoking.
I think that Zoloft is better for you than smoking. If you are smoking, you already have a crutch and you are already “masking symptoms rather than dealing with underlying issues.”
It is okay to need something, including medication. Try to take the kind least likely to kill you.
My mother died when she was 57, of metastatic breast cancer that spread to her lungs. They kept taking out pieces of her lungs, until what was left couldn’t support her, because she was a smoker. It can get you lots of ways. I have similar memories that Al Sparks related above, of being nearly suffocated in cars with my parents who both smoked, and I hated it so badly that I swore I would never do it, and I never have, not even one puff, ever. My dad quit cold turkey when the first surgeon general’s report came out in the sixties, but my mother never could. They both drank, but my mother was much less healthy than my dad. Having worked in hospitals my whole adult life, I see that you can be two kinds of elderly. One is a person who is obese, smokes, drinks, maybe does some drugs, and doesn’t exercise, and you’ll be checking out relatively soon. Or you can be the opposite of all that, and live a quality life for much longer. Your choice.
I butted out under the circumstances when this was first posted. Everybody dies but you can surely hope to keep your mother past 62. I was lucky that my mother lived to 88, self sufficiently until seven weeks before she died of lung cancer. She was only in pain for a week- that seemed a long time. She might have lived to 100 if she had not smoked two packs a day for seventy years. She really enjoyed smoking. In her case, and I don’t claim it is typical, I believe she had no regrets.
In cleaning out her house I came across a draft screed to the paper pointing out how much more human misery is caused by alcohol than by tobacco. She was furious that smokers were social outcasts but drinking (which killed her father at 62) was accepted. I think she had a pretty good point. Go Mom!
I do not smoke.
Hmmm. Sounds like Dennis Prager. He likes to point out that no one goes on a physical abuse rampage after a cigarette.
Very sorry to hear about your mom, Fred. Tobacco and alcohol are very destructive substances which are best avoided. Life is hard enough without the fallout created from those vices.