I can’t believe my neighbor isn’t dead. He lives two doors down from me and smokes on his back porch at all hours of the day and night.
I know this because I can smell the smoke as it drifts over from 50 yards away through his yard, my neighbor’s yard, my yard and finally into my bedroom or garage.
He is always coughing. He is old. He appears frail and in poor health. But I can smell him out there smoking at 6AM, 3AM, midnight and all other hours of the day.
A few blocks away is another morning smoker. I have never seen him, but I smell and hear him every morning at 5AM as I walk past in the dark with Wiggles.
First I smell the smoke up to a half block away. Then I hear him coughing up a lung as he enjoys his early morning cigarette. I have no idea how old he is nor how much he smokes. I just know he does it every morning and sounds like he has bronchitis.
He sounds like he’s about to keel over at any moment too.
I also notice smokers when I’m on the road. They are really easy to spot. They are the only drivers who have their windows open. It’s funny, because I love fresh air so I will often put my windows down when temperature is over 60 degrees.
The majority of the other drivers use their AC at all times and never enjoy the fresh air – except for the smoker who bow the smoke out of their windows, flick their ashes outside and toss their butts on the road.
My wife smoked for most of her life. She started in her teens and continued smoking cigarettes right up until vaping became popular. For the last 5 years of her life, she vaped some kind of mocha java nicotine stuff.
I hated cigarette smoke and would avoid her when she smoked. For the most part, she respected this and would smoke away from me.
But in the car, even if she blew the smoke out of the window, half of it ended up in my lungs. In the bathroom when she smoked, she’d crack the window. If I went in afterward, I tried to hold my breathe. Her car smelled terrible. Mine smelled like it was brand new – even at 15 years old.
The doctors found a lump the size of a golfball in my wife’s lung in March 2018. It was lung cancer. Over the next 8 months she had a lobectomy to remove the lower lobe of her lung, weeks of radiology, multiple chemo sessions, at least 50 hospital visits and tremendous agony as the cancer spread throughout her spine, lungs, lymph nodes, esophagus and her breast.
She died 8 months after finding that first lump.
Ironically, she stopped vaping in her final two months because it no longer appealed to her.
I never nag anyone to quit smoking. I tried as a child to get my mother to quit for years and it never worked.
With my wife, I never even tried. She was a grown woman and made her own decisions.
I can’t even say today if she had known she would get lung cancer and suffer so horribly, that she would have quit smoking. Perhaps the 40+ years of enjoying smoking was worth it to her.
We can speculate that perhaps she got lung cancer from the pesticides she used when gardening or from the horrible air pollution in Pittsburgh, where she lived most of her life. I’m certain both contributed to lung damage.
But most likely, inhaling burning tobacco into her lungs, a pack a day for 40 years, probably had the greatest impact.
As for me? I only smoked twice in my life. Both times I was really drunk and neither time was pleasant. Smoking burns my esophagus and lungs.
It will be a bitter irony if I end up dying from lung cancer caused by the prolific secondhand smoke I inhaled from my parents, grandparents and wife.
But I’m not worried about this at all. If I get lung cancer, I have a plan.