Irrelevant Cheetah

Warning: serious post ahead.

A close family member is in the final stages of lung cancer, and so posts may be sporadic for a time, as you can well imagine. Blogging is not high on the list of priorities at the moment.

That, however, is not my main point here, though it does have some bearing. Rather, consider this a personal ranting and raving against the tobacco companies. This is my blog, after all, and I reserve the right to get on a soap box every now and then.

I never thought I would jump on the anti-smoking bandwagon. I smoked for fifteen years, and finally managed to quit four years ago. It was incredibly stupid, but I take all of the blame for starting. I was the one who lit that first cigarette, and I was the one who kept smoking despite all of the evidence that it was killing me. Hopefully I quit before too much permanent damage was done. I always figured that if somebody smoked, that was their choice, and I wasn’t going to second-guess them.

Enter my father-in-law, stage left. He has smoked for over forty years. Even before he reached the final stages of cancer, he smoked at least half of a pack a day. To his credit, he tried to quit several times, but a forty-year habit is hard to quit. He was diagnosed with cancer last year, and has been steadily getting worse over the last month to the point that he is now bedridden and rarely coherent.

Up until the point he was physically incapable of getting up, he continued to smoke. Many times he would actually fall down during his smoking sessions (he only smoked outside) but an hour or two later he would make another attempt to go outside and smoke.

This is what bothers me: he was fully aware that the cigarettes were killing him, but he could not stop smoking them. And the tobacco companies still swear that cigarettes are non-addictive.

Even now, when he is unable to get up, and spends as much time hallucinating and dreaming as he does being aware, he makes “smoking” motions with his hands, and asks anyone nearby where the ashtray is. The damn things have that much of a hold on him. I don’t blame Big Tobacco for him starting to smoke, but I do blame them for his inability to quit. We all know that they add things to cigarettes to make them more addictive, and this is just another piece of evidence, if you ask me.

So no more ranting. I just think that I have had a slight paradigm shift. I am now more aware that if somebody smokes, they may be struggling like hell to give them up, but it’s a stacked deck, and that’s not fair.

And for what it’s worth, it makes me even more proud of my (and my wife’s) own successful effort to quit.